Scientific phenomena are occurrences in the natural and human-made world that can be observed, and which cause one to wonder and ask questions.

A phenomenon is an effective way to start a new topic in your classroom. It can be a demonstration, video of an actual event, graph of a data set, a picture, case study, or any other thing that is used to engage students before they investigate or learn about a topic. Subsequent work will be towards understanding that phenomenon.

A phenomenon is something that exemplifies a core idea in science. It must be observable, but does give away the explanation, before students begin their own exploration of the topic.