Looking closely
Grade 3 science is unusually full: changes of state, forces, landforms, fossils, Indigenous knowledge of the land, and a strand about how scientific knowledge is built at all. The last one is the thread through the rest.
What Alberta asks for by the end of Grade 3
The subject: Science
- Investigate how substances can change, including water and the water cycle.
- Investigate the effects of contact forces on objects, including simple machines.
- Analyze changes to Earth's surface caused by natural events and by plants, humans and other animals, including farming.
- Examine how layers of Earth's surface — including where dinosaur fossils are found — hold information about the past.
- Discuss First Nations, Métis and Inuit relationships with the land and knowledge of it passed down through generations.
- Analyze interactions between plants, humans, other animals and the environment.
- Investigate creativity and its relationship to computational and divergent thinking.
- Relate the sources, accuracy and analysis of data to building scientific knowledge.
Alberta is one of the best places in the world for this unit. The Dinosaur Provincial Park badlands and the Royal Tyrrell Museum are both in the province, and the layers a Grade 3 child reads about are visible from a road.
The words, first
These are the terms a teacher will use at a parent interview, defined before anything below uses them.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Change of state | Solid, liquid, gas. Melting, freezing, evaporating and condensing — the substance is unchanged, only its arrangement. |
| Evaporation / condensation | Liquid becoming vapour, and vapour becoming liquid. The two halves of the water cycle. |
| Contact force | A push or pull where two things touch. Friction and applied force are the Grade 3 ones. |
| Simple machine | A device that changes a force: lever, ramp, pulley, wheel and axle, wedge, screw. It does not reduce the work — it spreads it out. |
| Erosion / deposition | Wearing away and laying down. Water, wind and ice do both, which is how a river carves a valley and builds a delta. |
| Strata | Layers of rock. The lower ones are usually older, which is what makes them readable. |
| Fossil | Preserved evidence of a living thing. Alberta's badlands hold some of the richest dinosaur fossil beds on Earth. |
| Intergenerational knowledge | Knowledge passed from one generation to the next, often orally. Many First Nations and Métis communities hold detailed knowledge of the land built over a very long time. |
| Divergent thinking | Generating many possible answers rather than finding the one right one. The creativity half of the outcome. |
| Data | Information collected on purpose. Alberta asks where it came from, how accurate it is, and what was done with it — all three. |
Evaporation
Liquid water becomes vapour and rises.
Condensation
Vapour cools and becomes droplets — a cloud.
Precipitation
Droplets join, get heavy and fall.
Collection
Water gathers in rivers, lakes and the ground, and starts again.
What to do at home
- Boil a kettle near a cold window — Evaporation and condensation, in ten seconds, with the whole cycle visible.
- Find the simple machines in the house — A door handle, a ramp, a pair of scissors, a bottle opener, a staircase. There are more than anyone expects.
- Visit the badlands, or look at pictures — Drumheller is a two-hour drive from Calgary. Strata you can see from a car make the whole fossil outcome concrete.
- Ask what made that shape — A coulee, a riverbank, a field edge. Erosion and deposition happen slowly and their results are everywhere in Alberta.
- Ask where a fact came from — “Who says?” asked kindly. Sources, accuracy and analysis is an outcome and it starts at the dinner table.
- Ask for five answers, not one — “How many things could we use this box for?” Divergent thinking is a skill and it can be practised.
Sheets you can print for this
- The water cycle — four words, one loop
- Six simple machines — find them at home
- Solid, liquid, gas — the same stuff, arranged differently
- Reading the layers — what rock remembers
The expectations above are paraphrased from Alberta Education's New K–6 curriculum fact sheets, which publish a snapshot of each grade rather than the complete program of studies. Alberta's full programs are at alberta.ca/curriculum.