Daily Academy

Kindergarten · Discovery Space

Kindergarten science activities and readings

A four-year-old has a great deal of evidence about the world and almost no framework for it. These short readings supply the framework: why things float, why it gets dark, what every animal needs — and each one ends with something the child can go and test.

43 activities in this subject · free to use · no card to start

What is a kindergarten child expected to do in science?

Canadian provinces write their curricula separately and word them differently, but the kindergarten expectations below are common across all of them. Daily Academy is skills-based rather than built to any one province’s document — see how it maps to your province.

  • Name the five senses and which part of the body each uses
  • Say what every living thing needs to survive
  • Predict whether something will float or sink, and give a reason
  • Explain day and night as the Earth turning rather than the sun leaving
  • Trace food back past the shop to a farm
  • Recognise a machine as anything that makes a job easier
  • Answer a question about the world by going and looking

Where kindergarten children usually get stuck

Big things sink, small things float

It is a reasonable guess and it is wrong — a log floats and a pebble sinks. What matters is how heavy something is for its size, and a bath is the best place in the world to find that out.

The sun goes away at night

Almost every child believes this, because it is exactly what it looks like. Replacing it with a turning Earth is one of the first times a child has to trust a mechanism over the evidence of their own eyes.

Food comes from the shop

Not wrong, just the last step. Tracing a carrot back past the lorry to the soil is the beginning of understanding that everything came from somewhere.

What the questions actually look like

Straight from the library, at the difficulty they are served at. Every question carries an explanation that appears after answering, whether the answer was right or wrong.

  • Living Things

    How many things does every animal need?

    Why: 4 things: food, water, air and somewhere safe to live.

  • Earth & Space

    Does the sun really go away at night?

    Why: No. The Earth turns, and your part of it faces away from the sun.

  • How Things Work

    What does the stone do in the bath?

    Why: It sinks. The duck floats and the stone sinks.

  • Health & The Body

    What do you smell with?

    Why: Your nose. Each sense has its own part of the body.

Common questions

What science should a kindergarten child know?

Most Canadian curricula at this stage focus on the senses, living things and what they need, everyday materials and their properties, and daily and seasonal changes. The specific facts matter far less than the habit of asking how something works and then going to look.

Why read science to a child who cannot read?

Because background knowledge is the strongest long-term driver of reading comprehension, and it arrives through listening years before it can arrive through reading. A child who knows why things float understands a later passage about boats far more easily than a child with the same decoding skill and no context.

Are these readings too long for a four-year-old?

They are 70 to 110 words, which is about a minute read aloud, with short sentences carrying one idea each. Tapping Listen reads the whole thing, and the questions can be read aloud too.

Start kindergarten science tonight

Twenty minutes, five stops, and every question pitched at your child rather than at their year group. The daily mission is free and stays free.