Key Stage 1 – Science

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Key Stage 1 Science: Teaching for every child

Children look at and explore:

• life processes and living things, such as familiar animals and plants
• materials and their properties, such as wood, paper and rock
• physical processes: simple ideas in physics, taught through experiences with electricity, forces, light and sounds.

Through work in these three areas children are taught about scientific enquiry. The teacher or children ask questions, then the children work together to try to answer the questions by finding things out and recording their work. They think about the tests and comparisons they have done and whether or not these are a fair way to help answer the questions. They find out more about scientific ideas from books and computer sources. And they write and draw (sometimes on computers), communicating their work and their results in scientific language, drawings, charts and tables.

Key Stage 1 Science: Targets for every child

Around age 7, most children are able to:

Scientific enquiry

• suggest how they can find out about a scientific question look for information they need (this might be by looking carefully at the world around them, or by reading something in a book)
• think about what they have found out and decide whether this is what they thought would happen
• look at and compare objects and living things, and classify them using words such as ‘loud’ or ‘quiet’, ‘hard’ or ’soft’, and ‘faster’ or ’slower’.

Life processes and living things

• describe what an animal or plant needs in order to live, and compare it with others by talking about simple features (for example, ‘it has six legs, not four’)
• understand that every living thing eats, grows and reproduces
• recognise that different plants and animals are found in different places (for example, ponds and woodland).
• Materials and their properties
• sort materials into groups, using words to describe their properties such as ’shiny’, ‘hard’ or ’smooth’
• describe how some materials change when, for example, they are heated, cooled, stretched or twisted.

Physical processes

• make a bulb light up using a simple circuit with a battery and a switch, and see how this is similar to the lights and switches in their home
• compare the brightness or colour of lights, and the loudness or pitch of sounds
• describe moving objects by talking about speed and direction.

View our range of Science Games.

This information is supplied by Parents Centre and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.