Y4 Living Things and Their Habitats Science Unit Plan(6 lessons, planning, resources and assessment)

Everything you need to teach a Living Things and Their Habitats science topic for a half term.

6 lessons, including planning, PowerPoints and resources. Mastery questions included throughout to develop children's critical thinking and scientific reasoning skills. Also there is an end of topic assessment paper and answer paper. Some lessons may take 2 or more session as they have more than one learning activity or an outdoor learning activity prior to the main learning task.

Lots of opportunities for out door learning - in the school grounds or locality.

Lesson plans and PowerPoints are explicit and easy to follow.

Where equipment is needed for experiments, equipment lists are provided on the lesson plans, although you will also need any bug hunting equipment that your school has.

All lessons have 3 differentiated follow-up tasks, with supporting resources. Most are provided, the rest are explained on the PowerPoints. There are also some opportunities for mixed ability paired/ small group work.

All lessons have an interesting starter, either 'who am I' or a 'fact or fiction' fact about living things - again to develop children's critical thinking skills, scientific reasoning and explanations.

Lessons recap, revisit and build upon children's prior knowledge. The repetition during the recapping sections of the lessons are great for supporting children with retaining information.

Throughout the lessons, there are thought provoking 'mastery' style questions, to encourage children to think critically, reason and explain.

There are opportunities for peer assessment.

We are learning to's include:
to classify living things;
to identify and name living things;
to use a classification key to identify vertebrates and invertebrates;
to use a classification key to identify the 5 vertebrate groups;
to identify invertebrate groups in their own habitat;
to understand how environments change and the dangers this can cause for wildlife.

Opportunity to develop science skills is also covered.

Links to 2014 National Curriculum are made clear on each lesson plan.
Cross-curricular links are also made.

All images have been taken from: http://search.creativecommons.org/ where no attribution is required.