Pond-dipping: habitats & lifecycles (Years 3–6)

Get hands-on to investigate the teeming life in the Gardens’ freshwater ponds.

Examine your catches by eye before investigating every hair and claw in detail under our microscopes.

Can you work out who feeds on who? Classify and categorise your findings into a simple food web.

Australian Curriculum connections

Year 3

• AC9S3U01: Compare characteristics of living and non-living things and examine the differences between the life cycles of plants and animals.

Year 4

• AC9S4U01: Explain the roles and interactions of consumers, producers and decomposers within a habitat and how food chains represent feeding relationships.
• AC9S4U02: Identify sources of water and describe key processes in the water cycle, including movement of water through the sky, landscape and ocean; precipitation; evaporation; and condensation.

Year 5

• AC9S5U01: Examine how particular structural features and behaviours of living things enable their survival in specific habitats.

Year 6

• AC9S6U01: Investigate the physical conditions of a habitat and analyse how the growth and survival of living things is affected by changing physical conditions.