Samoa Year 8 Science Syllabus

This information is derived from the Samoa Primary School Curriculum for Science, published by the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture.

Strand 1: Nature of Science

• Understanding about Science: Students compare ideas from different cultures about the origins of the land and sea and learn about the contributions of men and women throughout the history of science.
• Investigating in Science: Students ask questions, plan and conduct investigations, considering variables and developing explanations. They identify questions for scientific investigation, refine broad questions, make predictions, follow instructions, use data to recognize patterns and reach conclusions, identify variables, evaluate experiments, conduct trials, collect data, and use evidence for explanations.
• Communicating in Science: Students identify science vocabulary and symbols in texts, understand word parts and their origins, infer meanings, and recognize science symbols. They share information, communicate observations and thinking, describe designs, and organize data using tables, diagrams, and graphs.
• Participating and Contributing: Students describe how scientific knowledge is used in decision-making about environmental issues.

Strand 2: The World of Life

• Structural Features and Survival: Students recognize the structural features of a group of animals (insects) and how these features have helped them survive in different environments.
• Soil Community Diversity: Students gather data, classify organisms, and construct food webs to show interdependence within a soil community, including the role of decomposers.
• Conservation Importance: Students explain the importance of conservation, describe conservation issues in Samoa (water, forests, reefs, turtles, manumea), explain links between issues (water conservation and erosion, sedimentation and reefs), and propose ways to raise conservation awareness.

Strand 3: The World and Beyond

• Earth's Surface and Changes: Students recognize characteristic features of the Earth's surface and how changes are determined by subsurface processes like earthquakes and volcanoes. They describe plate tectonics, model mountain formation, explain volcanoes and their effects, and understand earthquake measurement scales.
• Energy Sources and Conservation: Students differentiate between renewable and non-renewable energy sources, explain the need for conservation, suggest increased use of renewable sources, and propose ways to use energy more efficiently.

Strand 4: The World of Materials

• Particle Arrangements and Properties: Students describe particle arrangements in solids, liquids, and gases, explaining how heating and cooling affect them and cause changes in state. They discuss air properties using the concepts of mixtures and particle nature.
• Air Components: Students recognize the chemical and physical properties of air components, explaining reactions like burning and rusting with word equations.
• Mixture Properties and Environmental Impact: Students recognize how changing mixture components affects properties and can cause environmental problems. They describe how human activities and plants change air composition, explain the atmosphere's importance, describe pollution consequences, and create awareness campaigns for environmental issues.

Strand 5: The World of Physical Phenomena

• Forces, Friction, and Motion: Students design and build a ramp to illustrate gravity and friction's effects on motion, predicting and changing motion through ramp modifications.
• Energy Conservation: Students chart energy sources and uses in a community, classify sources as renewable or non-renewable, build a model of a renewable energy device, explain its function and material choices, and suggest efficiency improvements and replacements for non-renewable sources.