Property refers to things that belong to someone. Your bicycle is your property. The house your family lives in is your family's property. Your school building is the school district's property. When something is your property, you have the right to use it, keep it safe, and decide what happens to it.

Property can be physical objects you can touch, like books, clothes, or land. It can also be things you can't hold in your hands, like the rights to a song someone wrote or an invention someone created. These are called intellectual property.

Taking someone else's property without permission is stealing. Damaging another person's property is vandalism. Neighbors respect each other's property by not walking across lawns without asking, returning borrowed tools, and keeping their own property maintained.

In science class, you might hear about the properties of materials, which means their characteristics or qualities. Water has the property of freezing at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Rubber has the property of being elastic. These characteristics are called properties because they describe what a material is like.