Description

The Materials and Motion Module provides kindergartners with integrated experiences with physical science, earth science, and engineering core ideas that relate to students’ interests and are teachable and learnable. Students investigate the anchor phenomenon that objects are made of materials—wood, paper, and fabric—and how material properties determine their use. Students use those materials to engineer structures, applying physical science ideas of energy transfer. The driving questions for the module are what is made of wood, paper, and fabric, and how are the properties of those materials useful to us? Students come to understand that humans use natural resources for everything they do and that people impact the world around them.

 After building a repertoire of practices with materials and objects, students investigate the effect of pushes and pulls on objects, and apply their intuitive notion of the concept of variables to change the speed and direction of rolling balls and balloon rockets to achieve specific outcomes. The guiding question is how can we change the motion of an object?

Students engage in science and engineering practices by asking questions, participating in collaborative investigations, observing, recording, and interpreting data to build explanations, and designing objects and systems to achieve outcomes. Students gain experiences with crosscutting concepts: patterns; cause and effect; scale, proportion, and quantity; systems and system models; energy and matter; and structure and function.