Science 4

Humans sense the world through five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

A biome is a large region grouped by similar climate — its long-term temperature and precipitation (rainfall/snowfall) patterns.

Sensing leads to a response — smelling smoke makes you look for its source; touching something hot makes you pull your hand back.

Terrestrial biomes are land-based (like desert, rainforest, or tundra); aquatic/marine biomes are water-based (like oceans, lakes, or coral reefs).

Many animals sense things humans can't detect at all, like echolocation (bats and dolphins 'see' with sound bouncing back), UV light (bees see ultraviolet patterns on flowers), magnetoreception (birds sense Earth's magnetic field to navigate), and infrared sensing (some snakes detect body heat).

Matter exists in three main phases: solid (keeps its own shape), liquid (takes the shape of its container but keeps its volume), and gas (spreads out to fill any space).

All matter is made of tiny particles that are always moving — heating makes those particles move faster, and cooling makes them move slower.

The same substance can exist in different phases — water can be solid ice, liquid water, or gas (water vapour).

Heating and cooling can change a matter's phase: melting (like melting chocolate) and boiling happen with heat; freezing (like making ice cream) happens with cold.

These phase changes caused by temperature are reversible — melted chocolate can be cooled back into a solid; liquid water can be frozen back into ice.

Energy can be described in many forms: the energy of motion (kinetic), light, sound, thermal (heat), elastic, nuclear, chemical, magnetic, gravitational, and electrical.

A device that transforms energy takes an input energy and changes it into a different output energy.

The same event often involves several forms of energy at once — a campfire gives off thermal energy (heat), light, and sound (crackling) all together.

Examples: a glow stick changes chemical energy into light; a wind-up toy changes elastic energy into mechanical (motion) energy; a flashlight changes electrical energy into light.

The law of conservation of energy says energy cannot be created or destroyed — it can only be changed from one form into another.

Earth's rotation (spinning on its tilted axis once a day) causes day and night — animals adapt to this cycle, with some being nocturnal (active at night) and others diurnal (active during the day).

The moon doesn't make its own light — it reflects sunlight, and how much of the lit side we see changes as the moon orbits Earth, creating the phases of the moon.

Earth's yearly orbit around the sun, combined with its tilted axis, causes the changing seasons — plants and animals respond to seasons by doing things like dropping leaves or changing colour.

Tides rise and fall because of the changing positions of the sun, moon, and Earth, and tides affect living organisms (like tide-pool creatures that must survive being covered and uncovered by water).

Lunar and solar eclipses happen when the sun, moon, and Earth line up in specific positions, including local First Peoples perspectives on these sky patterns.