The course of civil engineering materials is an important professional basic course and has the content of complex as well as fast update of knowledge system. The knowledge points are closely linked and the independent of each chapter is strong. However, the perceptual knowledge of students is poor, theory and practice have a big difference. This paper explores a teaching method based on multi-scale theory. From the aspects of reforming theory teaching and experiment teaching, we try to make the teaching for civil engineering materials more visualization, so that students can understand the internal relations of many civil engineering materials from the view of scientific thinking.