Looking closely
Kindergarten science is about noticing. Alberta asks children to explore properties with their five senses, look at how things move, look at what an environment is made of, and start taking care of one.
What Alberta asks for by the end of Kindergarten
The subject: Science
- Explore what things are like, using the five senses.
- Look at how objects, people and animals move.
- Look at what makes up an environment.
- Take care of the environment by reducing waste, reusing and recycling.
- Find out what instructions are for.
The last one is the surprise on the list. “The purpose of instructions” is the beginning of computational thinking: a set of steps, in order, that someone else can follow and get the same result.
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 |
|---|---|
| Property | Something you can observe about an object: rough, cold, loud, heavy, red. |
| The five senses | Sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste — the five ways of collecting a property. |
| Observe | Look carefully and say what you notice, without deciding yet what it means. |
| Environment | Everything around a living thing: the air, the water, the ground, the weather and everything else living there. |
| Reduce, reuse, recycle | Three different things, in that order of usefulness. Reduce is using less to begin with; reuse is using the same object again; recycle is breaking it down to make something new. |
| Instruction | One step someone else can follow. A useful set of instructions is in order, and is clear enough that a different person gets the same result. |
See
Hear
Smell
Touch
Taste
What to do at home
- One object, five senses — An orange. What does it look like, feel like, smell like, sound like when you squeeze it, taste like? Say the sense out loud each time.
- Guess with your eyes shut — A bag with a spoon, a sock and a stone in it. Reaching in and naming them is touch doing the work on its own.
- What made it move? — A ball had to be kicked. A dog moves itself. A leaf was moved by the wind. Sorting those three is the movement outcome, done in a driveway.
- Give them the recipe — Let them tell you the steps for making toast, then follow them exactly — including the wrong bits. Funny, and it teaches order and precision in one go.
- Sort the bin together — Which of these could be used again? Which one gets recycled? Doing the household sort is the outcome itself, not a practice version of it.
Sheets you can print for this
- Which senses would you use? — circle all that fit
- Does it move? — by itself, or does something move it?
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.