Welcome to National Science Week! This year's theme is Species Survival - More than just sustainability. We've put together a free, ready-to-go prac pack to match, plus risk assessments available via RiskAssess.
The two activities in our prac pack are aligned to follow the Victorian Curriculum and Australian Curriculum 9.0
Year 10 - Modelling natural selection
Year 7 - Battle of the species: native vs invasive
Below is a handy summary of each activity and tips on how to adapt them for other year levels.
Activity 1 - Modelling natural selection
Science inquiry skill focus: Processing and analysing - Representing data
This investigation requires you to construct appropriate representations to organise data and information.
The questions in this practical are most appropriate for Years 9 and 10.
To modify this for Years 7 and 8, consider removing the introduction and providing the students with a spreadsheet which creates the graph for the students when the data is added.
Help scaffold the conclusion writing process for students as they practice the skill of scientific reporting. For example, provide them with a framework such as RERUN.
You might also wish to use the model answers to copy and paste a conclusion and then remove some key terms, adding them to a word bank that your students can then use to fill it in.
Activity 2 - Battle of the species: native vs invasive
Science inquiry skill focus: Evaluating – Evaluating a method
This investigation requires you to identify possible errors within a method.
The questions in this practical are most appropriate for Years 7 and 8.
To modify this for Years 9 and 10, consider having the students write their own conclusion with a framework such as RERUN, which we provide in our relevant skill slides (see below).
You may wish to change the focus of the skill to evaluating how to make the method valid. You could do this by having students compare their results to see if by following the same method, they were all able to obtain similar results and if not, how the method might be improved to achieve that.
For information about our 7-10 Science resources, and to get access to skill slides, editable lesson slides, pracs and more, click here.
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