ARCHIVED School Science Glossary - Introduction

Nunavut Arctic College, Nunatta Campus (Iqaluit, Nunavut)

Elementary Science is, in content, approach, and educational aims, a surely unique curricular area. It is also one of particular importance and relevance to the young … who, in this time of rapid change and new opportunity, should be reaching for and defining for themselves the best of possible worlds. Indeed, what other subject in the northern curriculum calls for the range of teaching skills or offers the possibilities for far-reaching success!

Science (from the Latin, scientia, meaning knowledge) is both a body of human knowledge, accumulated, organized, tested, and being extended, and a way of looking at the world around us, wondering, questioning, inferring, verifying, generalizing. In the science lesson, the science component of a school theme, the science fair project, or the outdoor excursion that can so extend horizons, Elementary Science at its best is a total learning experience that takes teacher and students beyond chalkboard notes and worksheets, beyond any preset topic outline, and beyond the usual confines of curriculum.

Current Northwest Territories curriculum guides not only block out scope and sequence for major thematic areas (Life and the Environment; Matter and Energy; Earth, Space, and Time), but also identify and stress intellectual process skills which children are to acquire through school science teaching and, in turn, to use to extend their science insights (Elementary Science: Primary Program Guide, 1986, pp. 9-11). A fuller development of these and related ideas can be found in Northwest Territories Education, Junior High Science (1991). Science themes at this more advanced level (which serve to underline where the elementary school program is heading) are: Characteristics of Living Things, Interactions in Our Environment, Diversity of Living Things, Energy in Our Lives, Physical Nature of Our Environment, Chemical Nature of Our Environment, Forces That Shape Our Earth, Movements in the Earth's Crust, and Understanding and Exploring the Universe. The intent of this vocabulary compilation is to support the teacher at elementary level, and these "junior high" thrusts confirm the kind of terminology that should be useful in preparation.

The fine work by elementary children to be seen in some of the more successful community science fairs—all too often presented solely in English—underlies for us the very real need for much of the technical language incorporated into this compilation. (Our own Inuktitut skills are lamentably limited—equivalencies here represent the good work of a Nunavut Arctic College translator/interpreter team—but we caught our own students inserting an Inuktitut "thingamabob" or "whachamacallit" rather repeatedly in oral science presentations. The right word can be essential!)

Identification of appropriate terms for inclusion has been facilitated by the review of major textbook series at the grade levels—not that textbooks, in themselves, are science or are the Territorial program. In this regard the support of libraries and curriculum laboratories at University of British Columbia, University of Ottawa, and Concordia University is acknowledged. (I do notice that children's shelves, in particular in the Science section of community libraries, are heavily weighted toward Life Sciences, with a modest presence of such as Astronomy and Earth Science. Great browsing, but at best a less-than-balanced diet). Our greatest sensitivity to science vocabulary needs has derived, however, from interaction with our own Background Science and Science Education students in teacher preparation programs in Iqaluit, Igloolik, and Coral Harbour, and this help, too, is gratefully acknowledged. Such a listing as this, of course, cannot be exhaustive. While intended for practitioners in these fields earlier titles on health care and environmental terminology, could be useful in class or for the science fair project, as might our own compilation of school mathematics terminology.

Lists and descriptions covering broad science themes, accordingly, were many months in preparation. Efforts and input of others became critical at final stages. My wife, Frances, provided French-language terminology. Our daughter, Rosalie, in her final semester of Life Science at McGill University, did computer work. The all-important Inuktitut terminology represents efforts of Nunavut Arctic College's Interpreter-Translator team: Connie Alivaktak, Jeanie Eeseemailee, Jeannie Katsak, Evelyn (Papatsi) Kublu-Hill, Eileen Kilabuk, Sheila Okkumaluk.

We also relied on terms compiled by the Research Centre in Igloolik and we particularly thank Abraham Ulaayuruluk and the late Hubert Amarualik. We are also grateful to Rosie Kalluk coming in and providing us with the terminology for snow and ice. This preface was completed in Iqaluit, with French-language translation supplied by Julie Beauchesne.

Scientists, you'll find, can be intensely interesting individuals, often delighting in any opportunity to talk about their interests and their work. Such a man or woman makes a great classroom visitor! Forty-some years ago, as a student journalist and a prospective teacher, this writer got to know his first scientist, McGill University geographer F. Kenneth Hare—an outstanding conversationalist who had, he told us, filed his first meteorological reports in England as a precocious child. It's a small world as they say. Library research for this compilation put in our hands Science Explorations 9 (John Wiley, 1986), with a profile on a leading Canadian scientist. "Science is, above all, a compelling curiosity," Dr. Hare is quoted as having observed. For us as teachers reaching for the words to bring Elementary science alive, that about says it all.

Don Allen, F.C.C.T.
Iqaluit, September 20, 1997