Year 1 Science: Every Australian Curriculum Code, Explained

Year 1 Science in the Australian Curriculum is ten content descriptions, one more than Foundation, and the extra one changes the subject. AC9S1I06 asks students to write and create texts to communicate observations, findings and ideas. Foundation Science could be run entirely on talk. Year 1 Science cannot.

That single addition is the most useful thing to know about the year, because it is the one Year 1 programs most often miss. Everything else looks like Foundation with slightly harder content, so teachers reasonably run the Foundation routine again on new topics and arrive at reporting time with no written science evidence at all. This is a working guide to all ten codes: 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 2.

What changes from Foundation

Four things, and they are all in the wording rather than in the topics.

Communication becomes written. Foundation’s AC9SFI05 asks students to share questions, predictions, observations and ideas with others, which a five-year-old does by talking. Year 1 splits that job in two and adds AC9S1I06: “write and create texts to communicate observations, findings and ideas, using everyday and scientific vocabulary”. Note that create sits alongside write, so a labelled diagram, an annotated photograph or a captioned sequence all count. What does not count is a conversation.

Measurement enters observation. AC9SFI02 had students observing with their senses. AC9S1I03 asks them to “make and record observations, including informal measurements, using digital tools as appropriate”. Informal means blocks, handspans, paperclips and cups, not rulers, and it is the same expectation as AC9M1M02 in maths.

Fairness gets named. AC9S1I05 asks students to “consider if investigations are fair”. This is not fair testing, which is a Year 3 expectation at AC9S3I02, but it is where the word first appears and where the habit of asking the question begins.

Forces get their vocabulary. Foundation described how objects move. AC9S1U03 introduces push, pull, strength and direction, and asks for a prediction of effect. Full details are in our guide to the Foundation Science codes.

The year at a glance

Reading the codes

Science codes are AC9 + S + year + strand letter + number. U is understanding, I is inquiry, H is human endeavour. So AC9S1U02 is Year 1 Science Understanding 2, and AC9S1I06 is Year 1 Science Inquiry 6.

Version 9 does not sub-divide the Understanding strand into Biological, Chemical, Physical and Earth and Space the way version 8 did, so the sub-strand has to be inferred. AC9S1U01 is biological, AC9S1U02 is Earth and space, AC9S1U03 is physical, and there is no chemical science content in Year 1 at all. Materials appear at Foundation (AC9SFU03) and again at Year 2 (AC9S2U03), with Year 1 empty in between. If you are planning a three-year F–2 cycle, that gap is deliberate and you do not need to fill it.

Strand by strand

Science understanding (AC9S1U01 to AC9S1U03)

The three understanding codes are one biological, one Earth and space, one physical, and they do not depend on each other. That means the order you teach them in is a scheduling decision rather than a conceptual one, with one important exception: AC9S1U02 is about daily and seasonal change, and a season is not observable inside a single unit. It has to be started early and revisited, which is why it appears in three of the four terms in the sequence below.

AC9S1U01 asks students to identify the basic needs of plants and animals, including air, water, food or shelter, and describe how the places they live meet those needs. The second half is the part that carries the learning. This is not a habitat-diorama descriptor: the habitat has to be described as a supplier of specific needs, item by item.

AC9S1U02 covers daily and seasonal changes in the environment and how those changes affect everyday life. The everyday-life half is not decorative. What we wear, when we play outside, what is at the shops, when the school day starts in the dark: these are the evidence for the descriptor, and they are also what makes it teachable at six.

AC9S1U03 is the load-bearing code of the year, because it is the only one with a prediction requirement built into the content descriptor itself. Students describe pushes and pulls in terms of strength and direction and predict the effect of these forces on objects’ motion and shape. Both nouns matter, and the shape half is routinely dropped.

Science inquiry (AC9S1I01 to AC9S1I06)

Read in order, the six inquiry codes are one cycle: notice a pattern and predict (AC9S1I01), work out a safe way to test it (AC9S1I02), observe and measure (AC9S1I03), organise what you got (AC9S1I04), compare it with your prediction and with everyone else’s (AC9S1I05), write it down (AC9S1I06). They are six stages of one investigation, not six lessons, and the way to cover them is to run the cycle repeatedly on whatever content is in front of you.

Three qualifiers do most of the work. AC9S1I01 says patterns and relationships that have been observed, so the question comes out of something the class has already seen rather than out of thin air. AC9S1I02 says suggest and follow safe procedures, which is a real step up from Foundation: the child contributes to the method rather than following one. AC9S1I04 says provided tables, so you draw the recording structure, and it also allows visual or physical models, which is the escape hatch for children whose writing is not yet fluent enough to carry a table.

AC9S1I05 is doing three jobs at once and is easy to under-teach. Compare with your prediction (that is the Foundation skill, AC9SFI04). Compare with others’ observations (new, and the reason class results should be pooled visibly). Consider whether the investigation was fair, and identify further questions, both with guidance.

Science as a human endeavour (AC9S1H01)

One descriptor: describe how people use science in their daily lives, including using patterns to make scientific predictions. The pattern clause is a direct hook into AC9S1U02. A farmer planting to a season, a forecaster reading a chart, a family checking the tide before going to the beach are all the same move that the class makes when it predicts from the weather chart it has been keeping since Term 1. Two minutes at the end of a lesson, ten or twelve times a year, produces better evidence for AC9S1H01 than a standalone unit on scientists would.

The three hardest codes in Year 1

AC9S1U01: how the place they live meets those needs

The misconception: that a habitat is a place an animal likes or belongs to, rather than a set of supplies it cannot live without.

What you will see: “Polar bears live in the snow because they like the cold.” “Fish live in water because they can swim.” “Possums live in trees because that is their home.” Each answer is about preference or identity, and none of them names a need. The child can usually recite air, water, food and shelter perfectly well in a different lesson, which is why this failure hides.

The fix: stop asking where things live and start asking a four-part question with the same four parts every time. Draw a grid with the animal down the side and air, water, food, shelter across the top, and fill in what supplies it in each cell. A possum gets water from rain and dew, food from leaves and fruit, shelter from a tree hollow. Once the grid is a habit, the diagnostic writes itself: give the child a photo of an unfamiliar environment and ask what it would supply. A child who has the concept talks about what is in the picture; a child who does not talks about which animals belong there.

AC9S1U03: strength, direction, and the shape half

The misconception: that a force is the same thing as movement, so no movement means no force.

What you will see: asked whether they are pushing a wall they are leaning against, six-year-olds say no, because the wall is not going anywhere. Asked to describe a push, they describe the resulting journey: “it went really far”. The words strength and direction do not appear unless prompted, and the effect on shape is usually not taught at all, so squashing playdough is never connected to force.

The fix: run a squash-and-stretch station alongside every movement station, and use the same two words at both. Playdough, sponges, springs, a rubber band, a plastic bottle. Each time, ask the two questions in order: how hard (strength) and which way (direction), then what changed, motion or shape or both. Deliberately include forces with no visible result, such as pushing a wall or pulling a table leg, and ask the same two questions anyway. The point is to establish that a push has a strength and a direction whether or not something moves, which is the foundation for AC9S4U03 three years later.

AC9S1I06: writing findings rather than recounting the lesson

This is the new code of the year, and it is the one most likely to be recorded as covered when it is not.

The misconception: that writing about science means writing about the science lesson.

What you will see: “First we got the ramps out. Then Mia got to go first. Then it was my turn. It was fun.” That is a personal recount, it is a perfectly good AC9E1LY06 text, and it contains no observation, no finding and no scientific vocabulary. The result of the investigation does not appear anywhere in it.

The fix: supply a frame keyed to the result rather than to the sequence, and ban the word then for the first term of using it. Three sentences: I thought ____. I saw ____. So ____. Then require one word from the lesson’s vocabulary list, which you have written on the board, in the middle sentence. The descriptor says “everyday and scientific vocabulary”, so both are expected: a child may write “I pushed it hard and it rolled a long way, that is a strong push”, and the everyday clause plus the named term is exactly the level intended. Labelled diagrams count too, and for a child whose transcription is the bottleneck, a drawing with three labels is better evidence than three copied sentences.

What students need to arrive with

From Foundation Science: AC9SFU01 (grouping by observed external features) is the direct prerequisite for AC9S1U01, because a child who groups by prior knowledge rather than by observation will describe habitats the same way. AC9SFU02 (how objects move, and what influences it) is the prerequisite for AC9S1U03, minus the vocabulary. AC9SFI01 to AC9SFI04 are the prerequisite cycle, and AC9SFI05, sharing orally, is what AC9S1I06 converts into writing.

From outside Science, two prerequisites matter more than the Science ones. AC9M1M02, measuring length with uniform informal units used end to end without gaps, is the same skill AC9S1I03 needs, and a child who is still leaving gaps between blocks will produce unusable science data. AC9E1LY06, creating and re-reading short written texts, is what AC9S1I06 rides on. Our guide to the Year 1 Maths codes and guide to the Year 1 English codes cover both, and teaching them in the science lesson rather than twice is the efficient move.

What this year sets up

• The inquiry strand does not change at all next year. AC9S2I01 to AC9S2I06 are word for word identical to AC9S1I01 to AC9S1I06, and AC9S2H01 is identical to AC9S1H01. Seven of Year 2’s ten codes repeat Year 1 verbatim. What rises is the standard, not the wording, so anything left shaky this year has one more year of grace and then re-bases hard at Year 3.
• AC9S1U02 (daily and seasonal change) becomes AC9S2U01, which explains the pattern by putting Earth in the solar system.
• AC9S1U01 (basic needs) has no Year 2 successor. Year 2 is the only year in F–6 with no biological science content at all. Living things return at AC9S3U01 (living and non-living, life cycles) and then at AC9S4U01 (food chains), where the needs learned this year become the feeding relationships of a habitat.
• AC9S1U03 (pushes and pulls) has no successor until AC9S4U03, forces exerted by one object on another, including friction, gravity and magnetism. That is a three-year gap, and it is the strongest argument for making the strength-and-direction vocabulary genuinely automatic this year rather than approximately right.
• At Year 3 everything moves at once: informal measurement becomes formal measurement with scaled instruments (AC9S3I03), provided tables become student-constructed tables and column graphs (AC9S3I04), considering fairness becomes identifying the elements of a fair test (AC9S3I02), and Human Endeavour doubles from one code to two.

A term-by-term order

1. Term 1: start the weather record, and rebuild the cycle. Open AC9S1U02 on day one as a daily routine, not a unit: a weather symbol and a temperature word recorded every morning, all year. It is the only content that needs twelve months to become visible. Spend the teaching time on re-running the Foundation inquiry cycle (AC9S1I01 to AC9S1I05) on familiar content, and introduce AC9S1I03 informal measurement as soon as AC9M1M02 has been taught in maths. Hold AC9S1I06 back until the routine is solid.
2. Term 2: living things and their needs. AC9S1U01 in full, using the four-column needs grid from the start. This is the right term for it because plants can be planted in Term 2 and observed for the rest of the year, which gives AC9S1I03 something real to measure weekly. Introduce AC9S1I06 here, on content the class knows well, with the three sentence frames. Writing is easier when the science is not also new.
3. Term 3: forces, and the full cycle at pace. AC9S1U03 with a movement station and a squash-and-stretch station running together, and AC9S1I01 to AC9S1I06 as a complete cycle every time. Forces produce genuinely surprising results, which is what AC9S1I05 needs to bite on, and this is the term where predictions have to be committed to before the test rather than remembered afterwards. Pool class results visibly so that comparing with others’ observations is a real step rather than a phrase.
4. Term 4: the seasons pay off, and people use science. Return to AC9S1U02 with three terms of weather data in hand and ask the pattern questions: what happened to the temperature words, what changed about what we wore, what changed about when it got dark. Then run AC9S1H01 off the back of it, because predicting from a pattern is now something the class has actually done. Finish with AC9S1I06 producing a real text for a real reader, such as a seasonal report for another class.

Forces sit in Term 3 rather than Term 1 for a specific reason. AC9S1I06 is the hardest new demand of the year and it should be introduced on easy content (Term 2 plants), not on content that is itself difficult. By Term 3 the writing frame is familiar and the forces content can carry it.

Assessment checkpoints

One diagnostic per strand, each pointing at a named reteach.

• Understanding, biological. Show a photograph of an environment the child has not studied, such as a rock pool or a desert, and ask what an animal living there would get from it. Talk about supplies in the picture means AC9S1U01 is secure. Naming animals that live there, or saying they like it, means reteach the four-column needs grid with familiar animals before adding new environments.
• Understanding, physical. Hand over playdough and ask them to change it with a push, then describe the push. Two attributes without prompting (a hard push, downwards) means AC9S1U03 is secure. Describing only what happened to the playdough means reteach with the two fixed questions, how hard and which way, asked at every station.
• Understanding, Earth and space. Ask what will be different about going outside in three months, and why. An answer tied to the season means AC9S1U02 is secure. An answer about tomorrow, or about a birthday, means the daily record has not yet been read as a pattern: reteach by graphing the record rather than adding more of it.
• Inquiry, measurement. Ask them to find out which of two objects is longer using blocks, and watch the blocks rather than the answer. Uniform units, no gaps, end to end means AC9S1I03 is secure. Gaps or mixed units means the reteach belongs in maths at AC9M1M02, not in science.
• Inquiry, writing. After any investigation, ask for three sentences without the frame on display. A statement of what was expected, what was seen and what that means, with one science word in it, means AC9S1I06 is secure. A chronological recount of the lesson means the frame goes back up and the word then stays banned for another term.
• Human endeavour. Ask who else uses the kind of thinking we did today. Naming a person and what they would look at means AC9S1H01 is secure. “Scientists” on its own means the two-minute naming habit has not been running at the end of lessons.

Records and evidence

Year 1 Science produces more paper than Foundation, and AC9S1I06 is the reason. That is convenient, because the written texts are also the easiest evidence to file. The trap is that they look like English work, so keep the code in the caption: “AC9S1I06 and AC9S1U03, written findings, ramp investigation, 14 August” answers a reviewer’s question before it is asked, where “Science: pushes and pulls” does not. The weather record is the single best artefact of the year, so photograph it at the end of each term rather than only at the end. 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 band several years together and so will not map cleanly onto the term order above.

The other thing worth saying about Year 1 is that the content is unusually easy to wrap. AC9S1U01 works on any animal, and a child who will write two grudging sentences about a possum will write six about a dragon’s four basic needs and whether a cave supplies them. The descriptor does not care, and using an interest as the way in is free in curriculum terms. Sprout Lessons builds an interactive lesson from any of these ten codes, pitched at Year 1, 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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