Curious kindergartners are finding yet another outlet for their young inquiring minds.

Woodson Kindergarten Center is teaching more and more science to their 5 and 6-year-old students, as eight teachers work on their masters’ in science and literacy through the Hormel Fellowship Program.

Teachers in the program can study math and literacy or science and literacy. In both fields the focus is to integrate the science or math into the reading and writing curriculum.

The Fellowship Program is a partnership between The Hormel Foundation and the University of Minnesota. It began in 2007 with a Hormel Foundation grant of $1.3 million to Austin Public Schools. There are about 100 local teachers in the program.

Educators take the graduate courses in Austin, with visiting University of Minnesota professors from the College of Education.

Katie Schug is one Woodson teacher pursuing her masters through the fellowship while teaching full-time. The program is in its third year, and Schug said she is able to concurrently apply what she learns in class to her kindergarten lessons.

She will use lesson plans she developed in her courses — about weather safety, magnets, the five senses, and life — in her kindergarten class later this year.

Schug and Sarah Heller, another Woodson teacher in the program, explained that one aim of exposing kindergartners to science is to capitalize on their curiosity — encouraging them to develop an early interest in a subject many older students shy away from.

“In kindergarten you are so curious… We have them at an age where they want to explore and want to learn,” Schug said.

Schug and Heller collaborate with middle school and high school teachers in the fellowship program to analyze the unpopularity of science.

One of their conclusions is that students just need to interact with science lessons earlier.

And, though this is an age group that is busy mastering the art of tying their shoes, they are proving not to be too young for science.

“What we are doing is asking them to think about why things happen. To ask questions and predict answers,” Heller said.

Her science lesson plans have a central theme of weather.

During fall, Heller’s students learned all about pumpkins – they read and wrote about them, and observed them grow, and crafted paper books. Finally, they finished the pumpkin unit with a science experiment about density.

Heller demonstrated a sink-or-float trial, where the students hypothesized which parts of the pumpkin would do what, and then discussed why things happened the way they did.

“It is simplified in some ways, but the goal is to develop the interest and the vocabulary,” Schug said.

Schug said that before she began integrating science into literacy units, it was hard to fit science into the schedule, and the lessons were disconnected from the rest of the curriculum.

“Now, the students show ownership of it. They love it. They say, ‘We’re 5, and we can be scientists.’ The hope is that this way they won’t be so shocked in third-grade because it won’t be something brand new and scary,” Heller said.