We started our first official Science Day using Building Foundations for Scientific Understanding (BSU), which I browsed through yesterday and think it will be perfect for Kindergarten! It’s a K-2 curriculum, with four lines of scientific concepts:
- Nature of Matter
- Life Science
- Physical Science
- Earth and Space Science
It’s a very flexible curriculum and you don’t work through it sequentially from beginning to end. Rather, out of the 41 lessons, you start with the beginning lessons in each of the 4 topics mentioned above. There is a handy flowchart to visualize the lesson possibilities. The first lesson was about Organizing, Categorizing, and Classifying. While Satori sat eating a snack, I pointed out the various cupboards in the kitchen and asked her what was in each (plates, drinking cups, utensils, pots, pans, bowls, food, etc…). We talked about other methods of organization in places like libraries, grocery stores, and even our craft kitchen. Once she understood that things are organized into categories, we started our hands-on activities.
Craft Button Assortment
I got this amazingly varied assortment of buttons of all colors, shapes, sizes and patterns from DickBlick, called their Craft Button Assortment. For under $4, I got a whole pound of wonderful buttons, ready to use for crafts, math, and today, science! They arrived quickly and just in time for our Organizing Activity.
I dumped them all in a tray, and set out 8 smaller trays (we use these all the time) and asked Satori to organize any way she wanted.
Organizing buttons
She chose to organize by color, and of course, the first color she tackled was… PINK.
Pink buttons
While she was busy, I rambled on about how handy it is to organize things. I pulled out one of our Colorado Bird books and showed how they organized the birds by color on every page of the book – water birds, shore birds, fly-catching birds, etc…
Soon, she had organized several buttons by color. This activity may seem too simple for K-2, but its importance should not be underestimated! Make sure you go over why organization/classifying is important.
To really drive in the benefits of organizing and categorizing, we then did a second activity. I gathered up 20 various items from our kitchen drawers, trying to be sure they fit into about 6 themes of 2-4 items each. Yes, we had prehistoric mammal beasts hiding in a kitchen drawer! She grabbed them and automatically organized them separate from the rest right away.
20 various items
After we named everything together I told her to spend a moment to try to memorize it all. Then, I gathered them all up and hid them in a basket. I asked her to name all the items. She remembered only 3.
So I put them out again and we ORGANIZED them into categories.
Various items organized into categories
Swooped them all up again and asked what she remembered. This time she remembered 13 items! People who are good at memorizing lists use this technique of grouping things in categories to make them easier to remember.
The lesson drove home that organizing makes life easier in many ways. This initial lesson was the perfect “Foundation” to kick off our science lessons.
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