Check out the Disgusting Science kit. My daughter has this, and it has everything you need to do some very cool (and rather gross) science experiments. One of the things my daughter did was use the petri dishes to grow cultures of bacteria and mold from various parts of our house. She collected samples from the bathroom sink drain, the underside of the toilet bowl rim, and the fishtank. I’m sure there are online resources you can use to help identify what you’ve grown, such as bacteria vs. mold. If you have a microscope, your child could study the bacteria and classify it by shape (circular, rod-shaped, etc.). We didn’t do all this, since we were only having fun we’re deranged and not working on a school project.
If all that is more than you want to know, you can simply compare bacterial growth rates in different environments. You’d need one petri dish as a control, but use the same sample source for all of the other petri dishes. Put one in a warm, dark place, one in a cool place, one in the sunlight, etc. After a week, compare how the cultures grew in the different environments. Can you tell bacteriology was one of my favorite classes in college?
What’s great about the bacteria-growing is how many different comparisons you can make. You can sample your hands before and after washing them. You can take swabs of different raw meats. You can compare samples taken from different people’s mouths to swabs from pets’ mouths. Heck, you can even take samples from around the school if you really want to stir things up.
There are a lot of other things you can do with the kit, but the petri dishes were the most memorable for us.