The aims of Teaching the Science Stages 4-5 Syllabus are:

• To enrich teaching and learning Stages 4 and 5 Science and
• To stimulate the enjoyment and active engagement of students and teachers in learning and teaching science.
  

Your challenge
The community has identified that a strong and innovative science capability is the key to a prosperous and sustainable future.

Your challenge is to reflects on what constitutes quality science teaching and to ask: ”How can I implement the Science Stages 4-5 Syllabus to meet the needs of my students and the broader expectations of the community?”

Navigating this site

Main navigation

The left-hand side menu provides access to each area of this resource. Clicking on an option will reveal any suboptions that are available. The following image shows the Situation analysis section within Programming for 7-10, Successful programming selected.

In some sections another set of options are available within the main screen. The image below shows the subsections available within the Teaching strategies section.

To go back to the Quality Science home page at any time, click on the QTP logo (below) found at the top left hand corner of the screen. The home page provides information on navigating the resource, publications details and acknowledgments. QuickTime™ and Adobe Acrobat™ Reader can also be downloaded from here.

Several icons have been used to indicate the different options for support that are available as you progress through the activities.

		This icon will appear in the materials where there is a video of teachers discussing ideas addressed in the activity. This feature is available on the Quality Science web site Pleas Note: Be aware that video clips may take several minutes to load onto your compter.
		This icon will appear in the materials where there is a video of students demonstrating or talking about ideas covered in the activity. This feature is available on the Quality Science web site Pleas Note: Be aware that video clips may take several minutes to load onto your compter.
		This icon will appear when you are asked to provide a response to a task. If you place the mouse over the icon a window will appear containing some prompt ideas to assist with the task.
		This icon, ideas of teachers, indicates responses to questions posed in the material. These responses may be model answers, teaching sequences or assessment tasks developed by writers or provided by teachers who participated in the trial or pilot phases of the project
		This icon indicates that further reading and references are available on this subject. Usually the links will be to pdf files or hotlinks to the World Wide Web. Occasionally, lists of URLs are also provided.
		This icon appears when a link between Stages 4–5 materials and Stage 6 materials occurs. This link provides teachers with opportunities to explore a strategy or feature across both junior and senior science courses.

PDF documents

The following information assumes that you have Adobe Acrobat™ Reader installed on your computer.

(An installer is supplied on the CD-ROM version of this resource or can be downloaded from the following link - get Adobe Acrobat™ if you have a connection to the Internet.)

Any file which is downloadable in pdf format is denoted by brackets containing the word PDF and the file size, after the document link.

For example:

When you click on the following link - Social skills for group work (PDF 80 KB), you will download the file in pdf format and view the file. Depending on your browser configuration one of two things may happen.

1. The pdf document will download to your computer and automatically open with Adobe Acrobat™. In this case, to save the file, go to File>Save in the Acrobat menu and choose a folder in which to save the file on your computer. Close the Acrobat window to return to the web page you were on.
   
2. Your browser window will open the pdf document within your current window. Options to Save the file or Print the file will be available at the top of the window.

Tip: To download the pdf document without opening it, right-click (windows) or control-click (macintosh) on the link. From the drop menu select Download Link To Disk. (Note: This terminology will vary slightly between browsers and computer types eg.Save Link As and Save Target As will produce the same results.)

RTF documents.

Within the Resources section you will find some documents in .rtf format. These documents when downloaded will be easily opened in a variety of word processors including Microsoft Word™. This format of document will maintain style and formatting information. These documents are the most flexible for you to modify or customise.

If you click on a link to an .rtf document a number of things could occur depending upon your browser preferences. If you have an application configured to handle .rtf files, the document will download to your disk and then open with that application. If this doesn't happen, locate the file at the location where your browser places all its downloaded files (possibly the desktop, downloads folder on a drive or some other location established within the browser preferences). If double clicking the file doesn't open the file, locate and launch Microsoft Word™ and then open the document from within the application using the File menu.T

To place the file in a particular, easy to find, location when downloaded use the Tip mentioned in the previous section on PDF documents.

This is a link to a RTF document if you wish to try this now... A place in space (RTF 190KB)

Your notes

After you have entered responses into the text boxes on screen, you may want to Save and or Print your notes. You can do this by clicking on the link at the bottom of the screen called Printer friendly version. From here a new pop-up window will open which should contain your notes (including notes that may have scrolled out of view as you entered them) from the section you were working on.

Printing your notes

To print your notes simply go to the File menu (on the browser window) and choose Print..

Saving your notes

To save your notes go to the File menu (on the browser window) and choose Save as, and the destination folder. It is important to save your notes in text format otherwise text that you have entered will not be visible. The text files that you save can be opened within other word processing applications.

CD-ROM and the Internet

This website contains links to Internet sites located elsewhere on the World Wide Web. Any links to external sites are denoted by the color green. To access these sites you will need to have an active Internet connection. If you are not connected to the Internet and you use one of these links, a message will tell you that a connection to the linked site was unable to be established.