If you’re teaching the Stage 2 Science and Technology Unit 3 — Earth’s changing surface — you already know the unit itself is well written: 16 lessons on weathering, erosion and the forces that shape landscapes, with a fair test right in the middle. What it doesn’t come with is something to put on the board.
This PowerPoint is that something. It’s a 388-slide deck that walks your class through every lesson in the unit — the learning intentions, the vocabulary, the discussion questions, the videos (linked, with timestamps) and the hands-on investigations — so you can teach from the front of the room instead of from a 200-page planning document.
What the Stage 2 Science Unit 3 covers
Earth’s changing surface sits under the syllabus focus area Physical and living systems depend on energy, and it works towards three outcomes: ST2-SCI-01 (investigating the effects of energy on living, physical and geological systems), ST2-PQU-01 (posing questions to create fair tests) and ST2-DAT-01 (using and interpreting data). In plain terms, your students spend eight weeks finding out how wind, water and living things reshape the ground under their feet.
The unit moves through five big ideas: what landscapes and landforms actually are; Torres Strait Islander Legends and Aboriginal Dreaming Stories about how landforms came to be; weathering by wind, water and living things; erosion and a full fair-test investigation; and finally Earth’s internal structure, earthquakes, landslides and volcanoes. Along the way students build a serious vocabulary bank — weathering, erosion, formation, crust, mantle, fault line, sea stack — and the slides define each term as it arrives, ready for your anchor chart.
The First Nations lessons are handled with care. The slides walk students to the Torres Strait on the AIATSIS Map of Indigenous Australia, link the Legend of Gelam and the Worimi Dreaming Story videos, and scaffold the annotated before-and-after diagrams the unit asks for.
Teaching the erosion fair test
Lessons 8, 9 and 10 are where this unit earns its keep — and where it’s hardest to wing it. Students plan a fair test, run it with trays of damp sand and measured volumes of water, then annotate photos of their results to explain how moving water causes erosion. That’s three lessons of genuine Working Scientifically, and it falls over quickly if the ‘change one thing, keep everything else the same’ idea isn’t rock solid.
The slides carry the heavy lifting here. There’s a scripted think-aloud for introducing the investigation, step-by-step visuals that match the unit’s erosion fair test steps, prompts for the ‘keep the same’ checklist, and a structure for the photo-annotation lesson afterwards — so the conversation stays on cause and effect rather than on who spilled the water.
Designed the way you teach
Every lesson follows the same rhythm as the unit itself: a beginning with the learning intention and success criteria on screen, a core lesson, and a conclusion that circles back. Each slide carries a colour-coded badge — teacher input, discussion, your turn, watch, challenge — so you can see the shape of the lesson at a glance and students quickly learn the routine.
Videos are embedded as linked buttons with the exact timestamps the unit specifies, definitions appear on screen the moment you need them, and the differentiation challenges are built in rather than bolted on. Nothing on a slide will surprise you, because it all comes straight from the lesson sequence you’re already following.
One note
These slides support the unit — they don’t replace it. The Stage 2 Science and Technology Unit 3 lesson plans and numbered resource sheets are only available to NSW Department of Education staff, so you’ll need department access for the deck to make sense — the slides reference those materials throughout. You’ll still want the unit document for the teaching notes, differentiation advice and printable resources, and the practical bits: a rock kit, trays, damp sand and somewhere sensible to pour water. What the deck removes is the nightly job of turning that document into something you can actually put in front of children.
Quick facts
388 slides · all 16 lessons + 4 optional consolidation activities · Stage 2 (Years 3–4) · Science & Technology · digital download
A few questions teachers ask
Does it cover the whole unit?
Yes — all 16 lessons plus the 4 optional consolidation activities (tsunamis, modelling a tsunami, glaciers and careers in geology), across 388 slides.
Is this the unit of work itself?
No. It’s a PowerPoint designed to sit alongside the Stage 2 Science and Technology Unit 3 lesson sequence. You’ll still use the unit document for teaching notes and printable resources — the slides are the classroom-facing layer.
Can I edit the slides?
No — the slides are flattened, so nothing can be changed, moved or deleted. The only interactive elements are the video and website links, which work as normal. Everything is already sequenced to follow the unit lesson by lesson, so it’s genuinely display-and-teach: open it, put it on the board and go.
I don’t teach in a NSW public school — will it work for me?
This resource is designed for NSW Department of Education teachers. The slides sit alongside the department’s Stage 2 Science and Technology Unit 3 lesson plans and numbered resource sheets, which only department staff can access — so without them, the deck won’t stand on its own. If that’s not you, we’d rather say so here than after you’ve bought it.