Science at 
Nightingale Infant & Nursery School 

Intent 

At Nightingale Infant & Nursery School, we encourage a hands-on curiosity for exploration of the world. We aim for the children to develop their ideas and ways of working that will enable them to make sense of the world in which they live through practical investigation. We develop pupils’ enjoyment and interest in science and build on their enthusiasm, encouraging children to ask questions, experiment, reflect, make and learn from mistakes and acquire and apply skills which equip them for an ever-changing world. 

Implementation 

At Nightingale Infant & Nursery School, Science is taught following the aims and content of the National Curriculum. It is, where possible, taught through creative topic based work based on high-quality books derived from the “Power of Reading” scheme. The children are encouraged to be curious and ask questions about what they notice. They are helped to develop their understanding of scientific ideas by using different types of scientific enquiry to answer their own questions, including observing changes over a period of time, noticing patterns, grouping and classifying things, carrying out simple comparative tests, and finding things out using for example, books, photographs and videos. We encourage our children to use simple scientific language to talk about what they have found out and appropriate scientific equipment to perform tests and investigations. Children communicate and record their ideas and findings in a variety of ways including drawings, writing, charts and tables. 

We have a stimulating outdoor learning environment where children can explore a variety of trees, identify a range of wild flowers, investigate mini-beasts and animals and work directly in the environment using our outdoor classroom. 

Impact 

 At Nightingale Infant & Nursery School we develop, deliver and monitor a science curriculum to ensure that children know more, remember more and can do more.  We evaluate the skills, knowledge and vocabulary that they have learned and remembered and assess how they will build on this to progress to the next stage of learning. We give them the knowledge, skills and vocabulary to continue their learning journey in science into Junior School and Key Stage 2 and, ultimately, to the more specific scientific disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology. 

Recommended Websites

• Science Museum
  Home learning resources, experiments, virtual tour

• Natural History Museum
  Home learning resources, virtual tour. Lots about dinosaurs!

• British Science Association
  Practical investigations you can do around the home

• BBC Learning
  Enormous bank of videos, lessons and information across all subjects. New content being added every day.

• Dorling-Kinderley Books
  Facts, videos, quizzes across a range of topics. Includes a section on the human body.

• NASA Science
  Everything you ever wanted to know about space including facts, quizzes and games. Answers that favourite children’s question, “Why is the sky blue?”

• Crickweb
  Games and activities across a range of subjects. Nice clear and simple sorting and labelling activities including parts of the body

• STEM
  Activities across science, maths, computing and technology. Check appropriate for the age group

Scientific Vocabulary

Word	Meaning	Example
science	study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.
fair test	a controlled investigation used to answer a question in a scientific way.
invertebrates	animals who don’t have a bony skeleton	insects, spiders, crabs
vertebrates	animals with backbones / skeletons	amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles.
omnivores	are animals who eat a mixture of plants and meat	foxes, hedgehogs, badgers
carnivores	are animals who eat mainly meat and hunt their prey.	cats, otters, tawny owl
herbivores	are animals whose diet mostly consists of plants.	Rabbits, deer, horses, sheep