Communicating in science resources

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: Play a card game to join two sentence fragments to complete a sentence. Assessment focus: a) relationships of elements in a waterway, and b) science vocabulary.

Task: Students play a card game to construct a waterways relationships web. Assessment focus: relationships within a waterways ecosystem.

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

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.

For this task students use a diagram to explain the different seasons experienced in different hemispheres.

Task: students interpret diagrams to consider the effects of tidal changes on rock pools. Assessment focus: relationship of living things with their physical environment.

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

Using characteristics found in peas, students construct two punnet squares and then answer questions on these.

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.

For this NEMP task students use a key to name five small animals. They answer a question about the gas animals need to survive.

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.

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

Task: identify micro-organisms. Assessment focus: using an identification key

This task is about describing the behaviour of light rays.

Students answer questions about how a road moves after an earthquake.

Students to apply their understanding of basic wave behaviour at the sea shore to make an inference about waves in a different but analogous context: to predict where the worst damage might occur in an earthquake.

Task: Choose images to enhance a science text about an adaptation of kererū, compare the messages of images, and reflect on the role of illustrations in science texts. Assessment focus: using and interpreting images in science texts.

Students are asked to explain why the Southern Cross appears not to be in the same place in the night sky that it was a few months previously.

Students write a story about the water cycle using a given sequence of events that take place.

For this practical task students are assessed on their ability to record their observations of the decomposition of a cut slice of pumpkin over a two week time period.

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.