Homes for Living Things - Year 1

Build Year 1 children's understanding of how places meet the needs of living things. This practical unit moves from noticing needs and habitat features to asking safe questions, recording genuine plant observations and explaining a simple habitat model with evidence.

Children learn that animals need food, water, air and suitable places to live, while plants need water, light, air and suitable conditions. They compare different plant and animal examples, connect a habitat feature to a need and distinguish an observation from an illustration or source fact. A credited Australian platypus case provides a useful comparison with familiar garden and pet examples.

The full route includes ten approximately 60-minute lessons. The eight-session route combines selected parts of Lessons 1–2 and 9–10 and retains all essential teaching and assessment. Healthy-plant observations take place over real days or weeks between sessions, with normal suitable care maintained throughout.

What's included

• 50-page Unit Plan PDF with a clean contents page, teacher guidance, ten detailed lesson plans, an eight-session route and 30 classroom resource pages.
• Ten separate editable lesson PowerPoints: ten slides each, 100 lesson slides in total.
• Editable 24-slide quiz PowerPoint with ten questions and separate answers.
• Two colour displays: Key Ideas and How We Explain Our Evidence.
• Eight case/source cards across two pages, including a credited platypus case.
• Evidence Trail game: rules and worked turn, six-stop board and challenge cards.
• Ten worksheets with ten matching answer or response-criteria pages.
• Habitat-model assessment organiser, individual evidence-conference page and rubric.
• Table of Contents JPG, complete 174-page watermarked Preview PDF and three listing-copy TXT files.

Lesson sequence

01 Living things need things

02 Habitats provide

03 Plants in places

04 Ask a safe question

05 Observe over time

06 Animal homes

07 When a feature changes

08 Build the habitat explanation

09 Habitat conference

10 Care with evidence

Assessment and answers

Collect genuine dated plant records, a habitat model and individual explanations. The organiser, conference page and rubric support assessment of content and inquiry skills. The quiz is a supplementary check. Read aloud as useful and accept oral, pointed, drawn, demonstrated, device or adult-scribed responses; assess reasoning rather than handwriting or public speaking.

Formats and answers

17 canonical files: ten lesson PPTX, one quiz PPTX, two PDFs, three listing TXT and one Table of Contents JPG. Classroom resource pages are contained in the Unit Plan PDF. Presentation text is editable; PDF resource artwork is supplied as images. Use a compatible PowerPoint application and PDF reader. The 174-page Preview includes the entire Unit Plan, all ten lesson presentations and the quiz; it is watermarked after the clean contents page.

Practical requirements

Provide already healthy plants, ordinary craft materials and game counters. Maintain normal plant care; no activity requires deprivation, animal handling or feeding, or a pond-edge visit. Children and teachers complete the blank observation records with actual findings. No physical materials are supplied.