Free Stage 2 Science Unit 4 Lessons – Built to Move

Teaching a new science unit often means more preparation than simply reading through the lesson plan.

There are learning intentions to display, vocabulary to introduce, diagrams and fact sheets to find, questions to discuss, and hands-on activities to explain to students.

If you're teaching Stage 2 Science – Built to Move, these three free classroom-ready lessons show you what each lesson can look like when those elements are brought together into one student-friendly PowerPoint.

Stage 2 Science Unit 4 Built to Move slide with questions and click-to-reveal answers

Three free science lessons for Stage 2 – Unit 4 Built to Move

These free lessons are the first three lessons of the complete Stage 2 Science Unit 4 – Built to Move PowerPoint resource:

Lesson 1 – Vertebrates and invertebrates. Students group animal cards by characteristics they choose themselves, then learn what vertebrates and invertebrates are, feel their own spine, and build a model of the spinal column to see how the vertebrae and the discs between them work together.
Lesson 2 – Invertebrates with exoskeletons. Students meet the invertebrates that carry their skeleton on the outside, watch a crayfish and a tarantula moult, and cover a balloon in papier mâché to model how a hard outer case gives an animal shape, support and protection.
Lesson 3 – Invertebrates without exoskeletons. Students free the balloon from its papier mâché case, watch an octopus squeeze through a hole the width of a coin, then use eleven invertebrate fact sheets to research and build a model of a soft-bodied invertebrate.

The slides are designed to be displayed on your classroom screen and followed in lesson order, so you can move through the lesson without having to create a separate presentation yourself.

The free lessons use exactly the same style and structure as the complete unit and include:

clear learning intentions and success criteria
key language cards using the unit's own definitions
explicit teaching content with the diagram or photograph on screen
every resource these lessons use – the animal cards, the spine model, the exoskeleton and octopus resources and all 11 invertebrate fact sheets – shown large on its own slide, with a link from any slide that refers to it
questions for class discussion and written reflection
numbered student tasks with instructions that stay on the screen
click-to-reveal answers, hidden until you click
a challenge task, a concluding reflection and an optional assessment

They are designed for Stage 2 / Years 3–4 classrooms and are ready to open and use. The file is an editable PowerPoint with the fonts embedded, so it looks the same on any computer.

Free Stage 2 Science Unit 4 lessons for Years 3 and 4

Want to try three lessons for free?

Download the free lessons below and look through the slides before deciding whether the complete unit would be useful for your class.

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Why use student-facing lesson slides?

A detailed teaching unit can provide excellent guidance for teachers, but it does not always provide everything needed to stand in front of a class and teach the lesson.

That is often where additional preparation begins.

Teachers may still need to:

turn lesson information into student-friendly language
create slides for the interactive whiteboard
find the diagrams, animal photographs and fact sheets the lesson refers to
prepare vocabulary
type discussion questions
display activity instructions
organise everything into the order it will be taught

Individually, these tasks may seem small. Together, they can take a significant amount of planning time.

The Primary Classroom lesson slides are designed to complete much of that preparation so teachers can focus more of their time on teaching and responding to their students.

What does the lesson look like in the classroom?

The slides are designed to support the teacher rather than replace the teacher.

Teachers can still:

pause for discussion
model ideas
record student responses
revisit previous learning
clarify concepts
differentiate activities
adjust the pace of the lesson

The presentation simply provides a clear lesson sequence.

Students can see what they are learning, important vocabulary remains visible, questions are ready for discussion, answers stay hidden until you're ready to reveal them, and instructions can remain on the screen while students complete their work.

This makes the lesson easier for students to follow and reduces the amount of presentation preparation required before teaching.

Teaching Stage 2 Science: Built to Move

The Built to Move unit sits under the syllabus focus area Physical and living systems depend on energy and explores how animals are built to move, and how the human body creates movement.

Students begin by classifying vertebrates and invertebrates, then compare how animals move on land, in water and in the sky. From there the unit moves to the human body: the major bones of the skeleton, which bones protect organs and which provide support, and how muscles work in pairs to pull bones into movement. In the later lessons students build and test working models of a hinge joint and a ball and socket joint, then write and present a scientific explanation of how a joint works.

Visual material matters in this unit because so much of the learning depends on looking closely at a body or a diagram. Students need to see the labelled skeleton, the photograph of the invertebrate or the model of the joint being discussed before they can describe it, compare it and explain how it works.

The PowerPoint slides therefore put the diagram, photograph or model on the screen alongside the teaching content, rather than relying on large amounts of text.

Stage 2 science classroom teaching slides showing the unit resources

Like the free lessons?

If the free lessons work well in your classroom, the complete Stage 2 Science Unit 4 – Built to Move resource provides classroom-ready slides for the complete unit: all 16 lessons and 4 consolidation activities across 461 slides, with a linked contents page, 158 click-to-reveal answers, every resource from the unit shown on screen, and links to every website and video the unit uses.

The same lesson structure continues throughout the resource, allowing teachers to move from one lesson to the next without creating a new presentation each week.

VIEW THE COMPLETE STAGE 2 SCIENCE UNIT 4