Topics
The science and social studies that children start learning in Grade 3 are not knowledge that stays inside the textbook. Weather and living things, industry and government: each one is a key to understanding the news of the day. This page gathers the topics that connect to the news, grade by grade. Pick a topic that interests you, and the articles will show you how what you learn at school connects to what is really happening. Knowing these connections also helps when thinking about current-events questions on junior high school entrance exams.
Social studies
Grade 3
Social studies in Grade 3 starts with getting to know your town and city through walks and maps. You look at the people and systems that support everyday life: the ideas used by people who work in supermarkets, factories, and farms, how fire and police stations keep life safe, and how tools and the city itself have changed from old times to now. You learn the ways of social studies: visiting places, asking people questions, and putting what you find on outline maps, timelines, and diagrams.
Grade 4
Social studies in Grade 4 widens your view to your prefecture, using atlases and other materials to see its land, its industries, and its transport. You study the life and the ideas of the people there: the systems behind the water we use every day and the rubbish we throw away, preparing for earthquakes and storms, traditions and culture handed down over time and the people who worked for the area, and towns with a character of their own. By reading maps and materials, visiting places, and asking questions, then putting it all on outline maps and timelines, you build the skill of finding things out and summing them up.
Grade 5
Social studies in Grade 5 moves from the land and climate of Japan to the links between our lives and industry. You study food production such as rice growing and fishing, manufacturing with cars at its center, the information society supported by broadcasting and communication technology, and the environment of the country, including natural disasters, forests, and pollution. You learn to read graphs and statistics and to think from more than one point of view, such as that of producers and that of consumers.
Grade 6
Social studies in Grade 6 has three large parts: the Constitution of Japan and how government works, Japanese history from the Jomon period to the present, and Japan in the world. Using the Constitution, timelines, and other materials, you study the government and taxes that support our lives, the people and culture of each age, and exchanges and cooperation with other countries. You learn to connect events and people and to see how history and the world are tied to you.
Science
Grade 3
Science in Grade 3 starts with looking at the living things and the nature around you. You grow plants and insects and watch how they look and grow, and you test everyday puzzles for yourself: sun and shade, light, sound, wind and rubber bands, the light of a small bulb, the pull of a magnet, and differences in weight. By comparing two or more things and asking what is the same and what is different, you meet the way science works: finding a question and checking it with a simple experiment.
Grade 4
Science in Grade 4 grows out of watching the seasons change over a whole year, seeing how plants and animals change with them, and learning how bones and muscles move our bodies. You study weather and temperature, how water turns into vapor and ice, how the moon and stars move, what electric current does, and how things change size when they are warmed, linking each to temperature and time. You make a prediction, test it with an experiment, and find the rule behind the change for yourself.
Grade 5
Science in Grade 5 looks closely at how life is passed on: how seeds sprout and grow, and how medaka fish and people are born. There are more topics where you control the conditions, such as changes in the weather, typhoons, how running water changes the land, how things dissolve, electromagnets, and the rule of the pendulum. You learn to change one condition while keeping the others the same, and to put your results into tables, graphs, and averages before you think about them, which is how scientists work.
Grade 6
Science in Grade 6 covers a wide range of topics that deepen what you have learned so far: how things burn, the properties of solutions, how the body is built and works, photosynthesis in plants, how living things are tied to their environment, the moon and the sun, how the land is made, and levers and the use of electricity. You do experiments and observations while using equipment safely, connect many results to reach a better explanation, and build the skill of drawing everything together.