Discover how Earth’s surface changes with this engaging Year 5 Earth & Space Sciences unit on weathering, erosion, transportation, and deposition.

This inquiry-based unit focuses on hands-on experiences and local examples, helping students understand mechanical and chemical weathering, as well as soil erosion and sediment transportation and deposition.

Your students will complete three fun investigations. The first explores the science inquiry skills by investigating mechanical weathering and chemical weathering. The second investigation focuses on soil erosion. The final investigation challenges students to apply their skills and knowledge by completing an assessed sandcastle erosion mitigation task. A comprehensive marking rubric is provided.

Other engaging activities include using digital resources to explore the effects of erosion and conducting case studies. Throughout the unit, your students will gather information about local examples of weathering, erosion, transportation and deposition. They will compile their research into a book or digital presentation for the second assessment task.

This unit includes everything that you need to confidently plan, teach and assess 8 lessons of Earth & Space Sciences, Science Inquiry and Science as a Human Endeavour V9 Australian Curriculum aligned content.

The unit plan package downloads as a zip file and contains the following resources:

1. Unit Guide: includes a scope and sequence, unit overview, lesson plans with associated and suggested resources, assessments and rubrics.
2. PowerPoints: includes two that explain scientific concepts and one fun interactive quiz.
3. Displays: a unit banner, a set of changes to Earth’s surface posters and word wall cards organised into tiered vocabulary according to colour.