Year 5 Science – Term 4 (WA Curriculum): Light Energy and Investigation Skills

What this unit covers

In Term 4, Year 5 Science in the WA Curriculum centres on the unit “Light Energy and Investigation Skills”.

Students explore how light energy travels, interacts with materials, and affects vision while developing scientific investigation skills through hands-on experiments.

Lesson sequence (8 lessons)

The unit breaks down into the following lesson-by-lesson sequence — each title below is a teachable lesson, in order:

1. Discovering Light Sources and How Light Travels
2. Planning Fair Tests to Investigate Light Behaviour
3. Investigating How Materials Interact with Light
4. Measuring and Recording Light Transmission Data
5. Creating Data Tables and Graphs from Light Experiments
6. How Our Eyes Detect and Process Light Energy
7. Analysing Results and Planning Further Light Investigations
8. Communicating Light Energy Solutions for Real-World Problems

Curriculum codes in this unit

Content codes:

Reading the codes: WA codes (the ones starting with WA) pack the year level, learning area, strand and content number into one string, while the national Australian Curriculum v9 uses a different anatomy that starts with AC9 — same content family, different labels. Our complete WA Curriculum guide decodes both, character by character.

Planning notes for Term 4

WA terms run roughly 9–11 weeks, and in 2026 Term 4 runs from Monday 12 October to Thursday 17 December — 10 weeks for WA public schools. With 8 lessons in this unit, that leaves breathing room for assessment, moderation and the weeks that disappear to carnivals, camps and public holidays — plan the assessable work to land two to three weeks before the end of term rather than in the final week.