Living World resources

Task: Read a story about a cat and use the information to draw a food chain. Assessment focus: Using information to construct a food chain.

Task: Match descriptions of kingfishers to their likely diet, and answer questions about food chains. Assessment focus: interpretation of text and pie graphs; conventions of food chains.

Students are provided with a series of six labelled diagrams showing a bean seed germinating and developing into a small plant with leaves. Students write sentences describing what is occuring at each stage.

Students are provided with a graph of lizard numbers on an island. They answer three questions about this graph.

Task: Design a plant that meets the criteria for a particular environment. Assessment focus: identifying specific features of a plant and explaining how they help it survive in its environment.

Using illustrations from five different beech trees and a key, students are asked to identify which type of beech tree each leaf comes from.

Students use a chart that identifies some birds' eggs to answer short response questions.

Students use a diagram that shows a food web to answer five questions about the information within the food web.

Task: Students interpret a graph to answer questions, and use background knowledge to justify their responses. Assessment focus: control of body temperature in different types of animals.

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.

Students are provided with data showing the temperature and the cloud cover over a one week period. Students use this information to identify the two nights that would be the best to protect plants outside from possible frost damage and also to identify why protection is needed on such nights.

Task: Describe how features of the New Zealand long-tailed bat help it to survive. Assessment focus: identifying features for survival.

Students use a diagram showing similar and dissimilar characteristics of reptiles, birds, and mammals, to answer questions regarding these features.

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 information.

Students are provided with an unfinished graph and asked to identify what three things are needed so that the graph is then complete. Students are also asked to identify the type of graph.

Task: use information and observation skills to identify whether pictures of fish are either bony fish or sharks. Assessment focus: classification, interpreting a Venn diagram.

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

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

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

Task: students explain links between a bird's feet and its lifestyle.

Task: Students use observation and a key to identify native plants. Assessment focus: Using a classification key.

Students use a key to classify and describe a number of the illustrated insects and spiders.

Using information about 'feeding links' between several different animals and plants students draw a food web to show all these links.

Task: Decide what information can or cannot be inferred from food chain diagrams. Assessment focus: reading food chains

Task: Explain how a change in the cockle population has affected one or more organisms in a food web in the short and long term. Assessment focus: Sorting observations and inferences; reading food chains and; using a food web diagram to predict impact of change.