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If you're a parent and you're worried about the 6th grade science experiments that your child has been assigned to think up for class the next day, here's something that should help make your job easier and take a weight off – they really aren't expecting anything really original. They are just looking for something average that's kind of practical and interesting. In other words, you could just look away all over the Internet and pick something up that sounds promising.

To many schools, sixth grade is a kind of a stage. That's when they begin with the science experiments and with science fairs. The great thing is, that they don't really push their students to be competitive at this stage. It's all supposed to be good, clean fun – so that they don't scare the students off science too early.

What the judges at these fairs want to see is that a participant really likes what he's doing, is curious about it, sees it as a step forward, and sees that it's something of significance. In short, with 6th grade science experiments, the experiments are not as important in themselves as for how they help a judge see how involved a child is in the spirit of scientific inquiry.

When parents decide to send their children to charter school instead of a regular public school they do it because they believe that the children will have a better, custom-designed schooling experience there. But it doesn't always work out that way.

The thing is, you can't just tar all public schools with the same brush if you happen to have seen a couple of unimpressive ones. Public schools in well-off districts have greater funding and offer top-notch teaching. And charter schools can be wonderful too. But you do have to realize that there is a range of quality there. You can't just send your child to a charter school and right away assume that it's the best available.

To begin with, at a charter school, the teachers are often likely to be younger and less qualified than the teachers you find at a regular public school. For instance, nine out of ten public school teachers have state certification. Only eight out of ten charter school teachers do. And you will find three times as many under-30 teachers working in the charter school system as you would in the public school system.

Most teachers just take up school science projects for a science fair and then forget all about them once the fair is over and done with. Let's go a little further this time. What if you could take ninth grade science projects and really turn them into winners at a science fair?

It is every ninth grader’s dream to win at a science fair and come out on top. To do this, you really need to be able to look at your list of potential project ideas and vet them the way a real tough judge would. You need to go over every idea and really see if they're good enough that a panel of judges would fall over themselves to vote for it.