Foundation Science: Every Australian Curriculum Code, Explained

Foundation Science in the Australian Curriculum is nine content descriptions, and five of them are about how to investigate rather than what to know. That ratio is the whole story. Foundation Science is not a knowledge subject with a bit of hands-on activity attached, it is a process subject with three small pieces of content used as the material to practise on.

Almost every Foundation science program gets this backwards. It runs topics (dinosaurs, space, the weather, the human body) because topics are what five-year-olds ask about, and then finds at reporting time that six of the nine codes have no evidence against them. This is a working guide to all nine: what each strand is actually asking for, the three descriptors that are hardest to get right, a term-by-term order, and the checks that tell you whether a child is ready for Year 1.

What makes Foundation Science different

There is no previous year to compare against, so the useful comparison is against what people expect. Two things surprise most people who open the Foundation year for the first time.

There is no Earth and space content at Foundation. Not the weather, not the seasons, not the sun and moon, not the solar system. The three Science Understanding codes cover living things, movement and materials, and that is all. Seasonal and daily change arrives at Year 1 (AC9S1U02) and the solar system at Year 2 (AC9S2U01). If you are teaching a space unit at Foundation you are teaching Year 2 content, which is fine as enrichment but does not discharge any Foundation descriptor. This is one of the sharpest differences from the Victorian curriculum, which does put the solar system in its Foundation to Year 2 band.

Science as a Human Endeavour is a single descriptor, AC9SFH01, and it is not a careers lesson. It asks students to “explore the ways people make and use observations and questions to learn about the natural world”. People, plural and general, including the child. It is closer to “this is what we were just doing, and it has a name” than to a unit on famous scientists.

The year at a glance

Reading the codes

Science codes are AC9 + S + year + strand letter + number. The strand letter is U for understanding, I for inquiry and H for human endeavour. At Foundation the year is the letter F, so AC9SFU01 is Foundation Science Understanding 1 and AC9SFI03 is Foundation Science Inquiry 3. Searching for “AC9S0U01” will return nothing, which is the usual reason a Foundation code cannot be found.

Note also that Science Understanding codes are not sub-divided into Biological, Chemical, Physical and Earth and Space sub-strands the way the older version 8 curriculum was. In version 9 there is one Understanding strand, and the sub-strand a descriptor belongs to has to be inferred from its content. AC9SFU01 is biological, AC9SFU02 is physical, AC9SFU03 is chemical, and nothing at Foundation is Earth and space.

Strand by strand

Science understanding (AC9SFU01 to AC9SFU03)

The three understanding codes have a common shape that is easy to miss: every one of them ends in a describing verb, and every one of them is anchored to something observable. Group by external features. Describe how objects move. Describe the observable properties of materials. At no point does a Foundation student have to explain a mechanism, and teaching to a mechanism is the most common way to make these lessons too hard.

AC9SFU01 asks students to “observe external features of plants and animals and describe ways they can be grouped based on these features”. The load-bearing word is external. Nothing internal, nothing about needs (that is Year 1, AC9S1U01), nothing about life cycles. It is what you can see, and grouping by it.

AC9SFU02 covers how objects move and how size, shape and material influence that movement. Note the vocabulary the descriptor avoids: there is no push, no pull, no force. Those words arrive at AC9S1U03. Foundation stays at the level of what happened and what the object was like.

AC9SFU03 asks students to recognise that objects can be composed of different materials and to describe observable properties. The distinction between an object and the material it is made of is the actual learning here, and it is genuinely hard at five. A spoon is a thing; metal is what it is made of; there can be a wooden one too.

Science inquiry (AC9SFI01 to AC9SFI05)

Read in order, the five inquiry codes are one cycle: predict (AC9SFI01), investigate safely using the senses (AC9SFI02), record what happened (AC9SFI03), compare it with what you predicted (AC9SFI04), tell someone (AC9SFI05). They are not five separate lessons. They are five stages of the same twenty minutes, and the correct way to cover them is to run that cycle repeatedly across the year on whatever content is in front of you.

Two qualifiers do a lot of work. AC9SFI03 says “in provided templates” and “with guidance”: the child fills in a structure you have drawn, they do not design a recording method. AC9SFI04 also says “with guidance”. Expecting an unprompted comparison is expecting Year 2 behaviour.

AC9SFI02 is also the safety descriptor, and it names the senses explicitly. Foundation observation is looking, listening, feeling and smelling, not measuring. Informal measurement arrives at AC9S1I03 in Year 1.

Science as a human endeavour (AC9SFH01)

One descriptor, and the cheapest of the nine to cover well because it attaches to work you are already doing. Each time a class finishes an investigation, name it: a vet looks at an animal the way we just did, a builder chooses materials the way we just did, someone counting birds in the park is doing what we did with the tally. Two minutes at the end of a lesson, ten or twelve times a year, and AC9SFH01 has better evidence behind it than a standalone unit would produce.

The three hardest codes at Foundation

AC9SFI04: comparing observations with predictions

This is the code that turns activity into science, and it is the one most often faked.

The misconception: that a prediction is a guess you are supposed to get right. Children work this out fast, and they respond rationally by not committing.

What you will see: the class watches the cork float, and then every hand goes up to say “I knew it would float”. Or, asked to predict first, children who say “maybe it will float or maybe it will sink”, which cannot be compared with anything. Either way the comparison step has nothing to bite on.

The fix: make the prediction physical and irreversible before the event. Every child moves a peg onto the float side or the sink side of a line on the floor, or draws an arrow on a whiteboard, and nobody may move after the test starts. Then run the comparison out loud as counting, not judgement: eleven of us thought it would sink, it floated, so eleven of us were surprised. The word to use is surprised, not wrong. A surprise is the interesting result, and once children believe that, they start predicting honestly.

AC9SFU01: grouping by external features

The misconception: that grouping means sorting animals into categories the child already holds, rather than into groups justified by something visible.

What you will see: asked to group a set of animal cards, the child produces “farm animals and jungle animals”, or “pets and wild ones”, or “scary and not scary”. Every one of these is prior knowledge about the animal, not an observed external feature, so none of them meets the descriptor no matter how confidently it is explained.

The fix: cover the names and use photographs of parts. Ask for the rule before the sort: what are you looking at to decide? Then insist the rule is nameable and visible (four legs, wings, a shell, fur, stripes). The best diagnostic is to hand the child a new card and ask which group it goes in and why. A child sorting by features can place it; a child sorting by prior categories has to already know the animal.

AC9SFU02: what influences movement

The misconception: that one visible difference explains the result. Five-year-olds reliably attribute movement to size, because size is the most salient property they can see.

What you will see: a big ball and a small ball go down the ramp, the big one travels further, and the class concludes that bigger things roll further. The two balls also differed in material and surface, and nobody noticed.

The fix: change one thing at a time and make the sameness explicit. Two balls the same size, one rubber and one wooden. Then the same material in two shapes, a ball and a cube. Foundation children cannot state a fair test, and the descriptor does not ask them to (fairness arrives at AC9S1I05), but they can notice that everything is the same except one thing when an adult sets it up that way and says so each time.

What students need to arrive with

There is no prior year of codes, so the prerequisites are developmental. The ones that matter for Science specifically are the ability to attend to something for a few minutes without touching it, enough expressive language to say what happened after it has happened, and a working sense that an adult’s question can have an answer other than yes or no. The related maths prerequisites are more concrete: sorting and comparing at AC9MFST01 is doing much of the same cognitive work as AC9SFU01, and the direct comparison language in AC9MFM01 (longer, heavier, holds more) is the vocabulary Science observation runs on. Our guide to the Foundation Maths codes covers both, and teaching them alongside the Science is more efficient than teaching them twice.

What this year sets up

• AC9SFU01 (external features, grouping) becomes AC9S1U01, which shifts from what an animal looks like to what it needs and how its habitat meets those needs.
• AC9SFU02 (how objects move) becomes AC9S1U03, where the words push and pull arrive along with strength, direction and prediction of effect.
• AC9SFU03 (materials and properties) has no Year 1 successor at all. Materials next appear at AC9S2U03, physical change without change of composition. That is a two-year gap, and it is the strongest argument for making the Foundation materials work solid rather than decorative.
• The inquiry cycle steps up once at Year 1 and then holds: AC9S1I01 to AC9S1I06 and AC9S2I01 to AC9S2I06 are worded identically. Foundation has five inquiry codes, Years 1 and 2 have six, and the extra one is AC9S1I06, writing and creating texts to communicate findings. That is the single biggest change: Foundation shares orally (AC9SFI05), Year 1 has to write it down.
• Earth and space enters at AC9S1U02 (daily and seasonal change) and AC9S2U01 (Earth in the solar system).

A term-by-term order

1. Term 1: the senses, and safe looking. AC9SFI02 and AC9SFI05 as routines rather than as lessons. Observe something real every week, describe it out loud, and build the habit that hands stay off until you say so. Start AC9SFU01 with plants, which stay still and are less emotionally loaded than animals, and start the grouping talk from what you can see.
2. Term 2: grouping and recording. AC9SFU01 in full, extended to animals, together with AC9SFI03. Provided templates means sorting circles, two-column charts and tally marks that you have drawn. Introduce AC9SFI01 predictions here in a low-stakes form (which group will have more?) so that prediction is familiar before it carries weight in Term 3.
3. Term 3: movement, and the full inquiry cycle. AC9SFU02 with ramps, rolling and sliding, run as AC9SFI01 through AC9SFI04 every single time. This is the term where the peg-on- the-line prediction routine earns its keep, because movement produces genuinely surprising results and the content is unfamiliar enough that children have to actually predict.
4. Term 4: materials, and naming the work. AC9SFU03 with a sorting and testing focus, which reuses everything from Terms 2 and 3 on new content. Close each investigation with AC9SFH01: who does this for a job, and what would they have looked at? Term 4 is also when AC9SFI05 should move from one-sentence answers to explaining a result to another class.

Movement sits in Term 3 rather than Term 1 for a specific reason. The inquiry cycle needs content with unpredictable outcomes to be worth running, and grouping (Term 2) does not provide that. By Term 3 the recording and predicting habits are in place and the content can carry them.

Four checks before Year 1

• Hand over a mixed set of animal pictures and ask for two groups, then ask why. A rule about something visible means AC9SFU01 is secure. “Because these ones live on a farm” means it is not.
• Hold up a wooden spoon and a metal one and ask what is the same and what is different. A child who says they are both spoons but made of different things has AC9SFU03. A child who can only say one is shiny has the property but not the object and material distinction.
• Before any test, ask what will happen, and afterwards ask whether that is what they said. Honest recall of a wrong prediction is AC9SFI04. Rewriting history is the failure mode, and it is a teaching problem rather than a child problem.
• Ask them to tell you what they found out, without prompting the answer. Two or three connected sentences using the words from the lesson is AC9SFI05 at the right level, and it is the direct prerequisite for the written version at AC9S1I06.

Four questions, one child at a time, and each failure points at a specific term to repeat rather than a general sense that a child is behind in Science.

Records and evidence

Foundation Science produces very little paper, which is a problem at reporting time and a bigger one for a homeschool registration portfolio. Photographs of the sort, the ramp and the material collection, each captioned with the code and the date, are worth more than a worksheet. “Science: floating and sinking” tells a reviewer nothing. “AC9SFI01 and AC9SFI04, predicted and compared, ramp investigation, 14 August” answers the question before it is asked. Our guides to which curriculum your state uses and state-by-state registration requirements cover which code set applies to you and what reviewers actually ask for. If you are in Victoria or New South Wales, the equivalents are the Victorian Foundation to Level 2 Science codes and the NSW K–6 Science and Technology outcomes, both of which are organised differently enough that the AC9 sequence above will not map cleanly.

Foundation is also the year where the wrapper matters most, because a five-year-old will spend twenty minutes grouping dinosaurs by their external features and about four minutes grouping a set of generic animal cards. The descriptor is identical either way, and using an interest as the way in costs nothing in curriculum terms. Sprout Lessons builds an interactive lesson from any of these nine codes, pitched at Foundation and wrapped in whatever the child is currently obsessed with, with the AC9 code recorded in the footer. Try it free.

Australian Curriculum content descriptions are © ACARA and licensed under CC BY 4.0. Quoted here unmodified. ACARA does not endorse this product. Always verify against the current content descriptions and achievement standards at australiancurriculum.edu.au.

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