Have you thought about why you need to eat, or why cars rust, or how batteries produce electrical energy or why clouds produce rain? Science helps you discover answers to such questions. So many things are based on science, and students can explore not just the world of living things, but all types of substances and how they react, while gaining an understanding of concepts, such as force and energy, that affect the Earth and space.

This course has been designed to be relevant and interesting and to give you the opportunity to achieve the NCEA Qualification in a manner most appropriate to your individual learning needs. Your Science teachers are keen to work with you to achieve your potential. Ultimately, however, your success in this course will depend on the work that you put in.

There has been a significant change to the course structure of Level 1 Science, due to both a change in the Achievement Standards available at Level 1 and also a change in how Science is taught throughout the school.

You will learn from wide variety of topics in Biology, Chemistry and Physics. All of the topics build on skills and knowledge from your junior science courses.

In addition there is a greater emphasis on practical Science skill, relating Science ideas to the everyday world, learning to understand and evaluate evidence from a variety of sources other than scientific texts. There is a lot of information out there, and it's not all good. We will learn how to determine the purpose for which a resource has been written and on how much it can be relied.In addition we will learn how to investigate through practical experiment, how to make experimental results relevant to others, and how to relate practical laboratory work to the wider world.

Each term will involve the study of one internally assessed and one externally assessed Standard in the subject area of Chemistry, Biology or Physics. The internally assessed Standard will generally be assessed during the last week of term, but there will also be work to complete prior to each assessment.

By the end of the year all pupils will have had the opportunity to sit 3 Internally assessed standards (4 credits each) and will have the choice of which 3 Externally assessed standards to sit in an exam situation. Each External standard is also worth 4 credits.