Using language, symbols, and texts resources

Students read a boy's description of himself, identify the places in which capital letters have been omitted for proper nouns, and insert these.

Assessment focus: ability to use contextual clues to infer the meaning of a word. (There is a link to the text used for this resource in the Using this Resource section.) Reading age 9.5-10.5. SJ-4-3-2004. Text provided.

Task: Students classify each of six drawn whales as either toothed or baleen whales. They then divide each group further by using a key. Assessment focus: Interpreting representations.

Task: use a key to identify a fish, then complete a key to identify shellfish. Assessment focus: Interpreting representations - classification keys.

Students read a personal recount about family relationships in a Pacific context. Assessment focus: the author's construction of two characters and an evaluation of them.

This focus of this resource is punctuating direct speech. Students drag speech marks into place to show where direct speech begins and ends. The resource ends with a collaborative writing activity. Students work with a partner to create and punctuate a conversation based on the characters in a photograph.

Task: Answer two questions about melting and two questions about dissolving. Assessment focus: describe and explain melting and dissolving.

Students produce a simple written description, using nouns and adjectives with some precision.

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.

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.