Using language, symbols, and texts resources

Students read an advertisement then identify and explain some of its language features.

Students complete a cloze passage and use their vocabulary and knowledge of grammar to create well-formed sentences.

Students make inferences from a poem. SJ-2-4-1993. Text provided.

The assessment focus is on the features of an explanation. Students explore and write an explanation of the impacts the food industry could have on improving health.

This comprehension task assesses a student's ability to make inferences about a character's feelings based on the evidence in a written and visual text, and their own prior experience.

Task: Use close observation of photos and prior knowledge, to write explanations of how the special features of animal tongues help animals survive in their habitats. Assessment focus: structure and function.

Task: Look for the similarities and differences in how students draw graphs to display information.

Students answer questions about major natural events that happened on the Earth in one week by interpreting a diagram showing these.

Task: Complete a diagram of part of the water cycle and answer a question about rain. Assessment focus: Question a) – the water cycle and conventions of diagrams; question b) – evaporation of a solution.

Task: Match the parts of a water cycle to the parts represented in a model of the water cycle and compare how they are the same and different. Assessment focus: interpreting a model.

Answer questions about rubbish picked up on a beach, and suggest reasons why plastic is the most common rubbish.

Task: Answer questions about what happens to water in open and closed containers. Assessment focus: evaporation.

Task: Answer questions about what happens to water in open and closed containers and compare to the water cycle. Assessment focus: evaporation, the water cycle.

Task: Students draw to show their ideas about what happens when a puddle dries up. Assessment focus: evaporation.

Task: Draw what happens when sugar is added to a cup of coffee. Assessment focus: dissolving.

Students use diagrams of substances with labelled atoms to write their chemical formula.

This task assesses student ability to find the text features of a science report about one of our native birds. The task is essentially a literacy task in the context of scientific writing, and can also be accessed from the English Bank.

Task: Students answer questions about a soil food web. Assessment focus: reading a food web, systems thinking.

Task: Explain the science messages communicated in a cartoon. Assessment focus: decomposition and photosynthesis.

Task: Use written text about farming's contribution to climate change to complete a flow chart, and answer questions about the two texts. Assessment focus: interpreting, using, and comparing different types of text.

Task: Students answer questions about a Southern Ocean food web. Assessment focus: interpreting food webs.

Task: Students apply both their knowledge of the functions of roots and information from a model to explain why care is needed when transplanting trees. Assessment focus: interpreting diagrams.

Task: Describe what happens to ice in a glass of water, giving reasons, and explain where water forming on the outside of the glass comes from. Assessment focus: changes of state.

Pictures are given of the life cycles of three different animals (hawk, turtle and deer). Students identify which stage the animal's survival is most in danger and give explanation of why it is not safe. Students also give one special feature that helps this animal survive at this time.

Task: Look at the arrangement of fibres for four different paper towels, arrange an appropriate sequence of instructions, carry out the instructions and then communicate the data in an appropriate graph that will help answer the question. Different elements of the nature of science are embedded throughout the tasks. Assessment focus: planning and carrying out a fair test, using evidence to answer a question.