Very often, teachers will give specific science lessons once to a few a times a week. During this time, the class will learn about a certain topic—for example, water, weather, animals, plants, or nature—through the use of books, demonstrations with actual objects, explorations outside, or interactive activities. In addition, kindergartners are natural scientists as they play and explore the world around them with their curious minds. Very often, science lessons overlap with math and literacy as teachers use tools such as books, graphs, and measurement to help students learn. Since specific science topics presented in a kindergarten class vary across schools, find out which topics your child will be learning about and find ways to explore and learn about these topics at home.
In order to build science skills, your kindergartner:
- Is a natural born scientist, constantly exploring, observing, questioning, and experimenting as she plays and interacts with her surroundings.
- Learns new facts about a variety of topics.
- Explores and experiments with the world around her and with objects provided by the teacher.
- Makes observations and records what she sees and learns using graphs, pictures, and words.
Science Activities
- Observe Nature: Pick something in nature—plants, the moon a rain storm, etc.—and observe it with your child for a few days or even weeks. Ask your child to draw pictures of what she notices, such as patterns and differences between things. You can write things down as well. Do this repeatedly and keep a science journal of different objects.
- Inspect Your Food: Cut open different fruits and vegetables and see what you find inside! Talk about the seeds, the difference between fruits and vegetables, and other things you notice. Try planting some of the seeds!
- Make Science Collages: Use pictures from magazines, newspapers, or online (with supervision) to create collages of different categories of science objects, such as animals, plants, birds, and fish.
- Learn About a Favorite Animal: Pick an animal your child loves and learn about it. Read about it, see it at a zoo or farm, or look at pictures online. Then help your child create a collage of she what she learned about that animal using pictures and texts.
