Sound Energy Teaching Resources

Bring sound energy to your science class with printable worksheets, hands-on activities and Google Slide templates — all created by teachers for science teachers like you!

Aligned with the NGSS curriculum, the printable and digital activities in this collection include editable options that you can use to easily differentiate your instruction and build out your lesson plans. Explain how vibrations produce sound, what a sound wave is and more!

Best of all, each resource has undergone rigorous review by a Teach Starter teacher team member to ensure it’s ready for use in your classroom.

Whether it’s your first year teaching about sound energy in the classroom or you’re just looking for some new ideas, we have you covered! Read on for a primer from our teacher team, including a sound energy definition and some common examples of this form of energy you can use with your students.

What Is Sound Energy? A Kid-Friendly Definition

A sound energy definition comes in handy when you're introducing this concept in your science classes, so let's start there. Here's how to explain what you mean when you talk about sound energy:

Sound energy is a form of energy that is produced by vibrating objects. It's an energy that we can actually hear with our ears.

What Is Vibration? A Kid-Friendly Definition

Objects vibrating create sound energy, but what exactly is vibration? Here's a vibration definition that may also come in handy in the classroom:

Vibration is the word we use to describe what happens when an object moves back and forth. For example, when an alarm clock vibrates, it will move forward and back!

When an object vibrates, it creates a wave of pressure called a sound wave. That sound wave moves like a wave in the ocean, pushing into particles surrounding the object. These particles bump into other particles, creating the sounds we hear from musical instruments, ringing alarm clocks and more vibrating objects.

What Is a Sound Wave?

Of course, if you're talking about sound waves, you need to explain what they are!

A sound wave is the name for the invisible vibrations that carry sound to our ears. Sound waves can move through different forms of matter, including liquids, gases and even solids.

Common Sound Energy Examples for Kids

We may not be able to see sound waves, but these core components of sound energy are all around us. Which leads us right to some of the most common sound energy examples that your students likely have experienced — even if they did not realize it at the time!

The Human Voice

Humans produce sound energy in a variety of ways — from the sound energy we create when we breathe or clear our throats to the sound energy of the human voice.

As you're explaining the way vibrations result in sound, why not encourage students to place a hand on their throat while saying a word out loud? They should be able to feel the vibration of the vocal folds in the throat.

This happens as the air from our lungs blows through the vocal folds, and it's how we speak — producing sound energy!

Music

One of people's favorite forms of sound energy is music!

This can be human-created sound energy made when a person sings, but it can also be created using musical instruments such as a drum or guitar.

Musical instruments produce sound in different ways, but it all ties back to the concept of vibration.

For example, an instrument with a string — such as a guitar or a violin — produces sound when its strings vibrate. If a performer plucks or strums the strings, it creates sound energy, or in this case, music!

A Slamming Door

If a student walks out of the classroom and slams the door, it's likely to distract your entire class. What's really distracting them? Sound energy, of course!

The sound waves that are let loose as the door vibrates against the doorjamb will move through the air to your ears and the ears of your students.

Often a door that has been slammed will create a loud sound — which is an example of amplitude, a word that describes how we measure the sound wave. The amplitude is what determines the volume or loudness of a sound.

Larger amplitude waves give us louder sounds — like a loud slamming door or someone yelling across the playground — while smaller amplitude waves create softer sounds, like a person whispering.