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A strong science program is sequential and unified not just throughout the course of a year, but throughout the course of a child’s entire schooling. One of the challenges of developing a strong science program is communicating in between grade levels and assuring that students are not repeating the same activities and that each year builds on the one before. The state science framework notes that “long-term planning of a science curriculum over a span of grades helps students learn new things and develop new skills each year” (2003, p. 4). Kindergarten is a very special year because it forms the foundation for all of the rest of a child’s schooling. Kindergarten science programs must provide children with the skills that they need to progress through the rest of their science education. One of the major challenges in Kindergarten is that there are no standards for prekindergarten and absolutely no guarantee that children have had preschool or any science experiences. As the teacher you have no guide for the experiences that children enter kindergarten with like you might if you taught higher grades. Therefore teachers must plan to bring all children up to speed and then progress through the standards for kindergarten. Long term planning will also help to make sure that all of the standards are fit into the already packed kindergarten year.

The framework points out the challenge of fitting science into the busy school day, especially in the lower grades where there are not as many standardized requirements and the day is filled with teaching students basic skills in reading and math. Integration is the best and sometimes only way of providing students with a good science education and meeting the state standards. In Kindergarten you usually only have half a day to work with and the students enter at radically different levels. It becomes a scramble to get everyone up to the state standard and prepared to enter first grade. It is very easy to ignore the science standards completely, and very rarely are there large blocks of time to devote to science education. Integration becomes key. If you can meet science standards while also teaching reading or math, it is much more likely that science will be attended to at all.