Grade 4 NST Term 2 Week 6: Properties of Solid Materials and Flexibility Investigation

Your Week Ahead

This week your Grade 4 NST class dives into the properties of solid materials. It is a hands-on, vocabulary-rich topic that asks learners to look carefully at everyday objects and describe what they notice using specific scientific language. Hard or soft, stiff or flexible, strong or weak, light or heavy, waterproof or absorbent. These are the property pairs that sit at the heart of this week’s work.

In the CAPS sequence for Intermediate Phase Natural Sciences and Technology, understanding material properties builds the foundation for later work on structures, forces, and choosing appropriate materials for specific purposes. Learners who can confidently classify materials now will find it much easier to reason about why a bridge is made from steel rather than cardboard, or why a raincoat is not made from cotton. The concepts are simple, but the scientific thinking behind them is exactly what CAPS wants to develop.

Coming into this week, learners should already have a general sense that different materials feel and behave differently. Most of them will have handled rulers, fabric, paper, and plastic in everyday life. Your job this week is to give that everyday knowledge a proper scientific frame, and to get learners recording observations in a structured way. The ruler flexibility investigation is a lovely little practical that makes the abstract idea of flexibility very concrete and measurable.

What Teachers Are Searching For

• Lesson plans for material properties in Grade 4 Term 2: Many teachers search for ready-to-use resources around this time of term. If you have been looking for something similar to life skills lesson plans in PDF format for Grade 4 Term 2, you are in the right place. Our downloadable Word document covers all three lessons with full activity notes and differentiation tips.
• DBE workbook activities to pair with this topic: Teachers often search for DBE workbooks for Term 3 and Term 4 as a free download, and many use DBE workbook pages as consolidation tasks. For this week’s content, look for the pages in the DBE NST workbook that ask learners to sort and classify materials. They work well as a follow-up or homework activity after your flexibility investigation.
• Simple practical investigations with everyday materials: The ruler flexibility investigation in this week’s plan uses nothing more than a ruler, a table edge, and a small mass or a gentle push. No specialist equipment needed. That is exactly the kind of low-prep, high-impact practical that busy IP teachers are looking for.

This Week’s Lesson Plan

The three lessons this week move from building vocabulary and understanding, through a structured practical investigation, to recording and communicating results. Each lesson builds on the one before it.

Day 1: Introduce the six property pairs (hard or soft, stiff or flexible, strong or weak, light or heavy, waterproof or absorbent). Learners sort a collection of everyday objects using property cards and discuss their choices as a class.

Day 2: Conduct the ruler flexibility investigation. Learners test how far a ruler bends when different amounts of force are applied, record their observations in a table, and describe what they notice using the word “flexible” or “stiff”.

Day 3: Learners write up their investigation findings, draw a labelled diagram of their test setup, and discuss which other solid materials in the classroom they would describe as flexible or stiff and why.

Download Your Lesson Plan

Download the full 3-day lesson plan as a Word document. Includes detailed activities, differentiation notes, and assessment guidance.

Download Lesson Plan (Word)