Amazing Antics: Life Inside an Ant Colony by Emma Wood is a rich, accessible non-fiction text that takes students inside the fascinating world of ants, revealing how these tiny insects live, communicate, and work together in highly organised communities. Through clear explanations, labelled diagrams, and engaging facts, the text explores ant colonies as complex systems, drawing connections between ant behaviour and human societies. Students learn about roles within the colony, nest structures, communication methods such as pheromones, and the remarkable adaptability of ants across different environments.

Blending scientific information with visual support and real-world examples, the text encourages curiosity, questioning, and deeper understanding of the Living World. It supports learners to build content knowledge while developing skills in reading informational texts, making inferences, and synthesising ideas, making it an ideal text for integrated literacy and science learning in the upper primary classroom.

 

This Interactive Comprehension Check has been carefully designed to consolidate and deepen students’ understanding of Standing with the Ancestors.

Rather than simply revisiting surface details, the questions intentionally target inference, author purpose, vocabulary in context, and deeper thinking. This resource supports meaningful retrieval practice while maintaining academic rigour and clarity.

The Check can be used:

• As an end-of-text consolidation activity
• As revision prior to assessment
• As a retrieval task in subsequent weeks
• As an engaging formative check for understanding

Each question aligns with key literacy skills, supporting students to think critically, justify ideas, and revisit important language and themes.

 

This pack includes:

• Private access link to the interactive quiz
• Lesson overview slides with learning intention and success criteria
• Reflection / extension task to deepen thinking

This resource is designed to support purposeful teaching, structured discussion, and confident assessment — while reducing preparation time.

 

Curriculum Phase: Phase 2

Year Level: Year 5

English: reading for meaning, identifying and synthesising key ideas, understanding informational text structure, using subject-specific vocabulary, making inferences, summarising information, and supporting responses with evidence from the text
Science – Living World: animal behaviour, ecosystems and habitats, adaptation and survival, interdependence, classification, and communication in living organisms

Text type: Non-fiction, informational text, scientific report

Key words include: animals, ants, ant colonies, biology, caste system, colonies, communication, community, ecosystems, habitats, insects, informational text, Living World, nests, non-fiction, pheromones, predator and prey, science literacy, species, supercolonies, worker ants, queen ant