Students bring with them to school a wide
range of experiences with language and texts. These experiences are included in
the curriculum as valid ways of communicating and as rich resources for further
learning about language, literature and literacy. Throughout the inquiry exploring
‘Our impact on culture’, students engaged with purposeful listening, reading,
viewing, speaking and writing activities for different purposes and contexts.
English and the “Divercity” Group
Excursions and Guest Speakers
At ACMI in the 75-minute
program, clips and short films were screened to help students
understand narrative structure and the importance of stories. This
experience included the work of Shaun Tan.
It aimed to promote positive self-esteem and appreciation of people,
places and things that are important. It stimulated discussion about what it
means to be part of a family, focusing on roles, cultural backgrounds,
celebrations and traditions.
At
CERES the students were absorbed in ‘hands on’ activities with a focus on
sustainability.
Through
the talk by an anthropologist, children learnt about his work with a focus on
life and culture in Papua New Guinea.
Research
1.
What
is a Flag?
The first thing that we did was talk a
lot about what a flag is. We asked lots of questions like:
What are flags? Where did flags come
from? What are flags used for?
We discovered that a flag is a symbol
for a country and can tell you things about the country that it represents.
Then we looked at lots of flags from
around the world. We noticed that most flags have a symbol on them. Flags are
very colourful. Most flags have only a few colours. Flags can be lots of
different shapes: rectangles, squares and some are triangular.
2. Our
country’s culture
We started to think about
creating our own flag. We looked at the South African Flag and the Aboriginal
Flag of Australia and thought about what the flags tell us. We realised that we
needed to find out more about Divercity before we could make decisions about
how our flag would look. So we had a conversation with the whole Inquiry group
about the culture of Diversity, what we would like our country to be like and
what we would need to have in it. We came up with a very long list of values
like Multiculturalism, Sustainability, Friendship, Respect for Nature, Love and
Freedom. We also decided that Divercity would be an island nation, in the
middle of the Coral Sea because it is warm there and it is close to Australia.
3. What
is a symbol?
We talked about what a symbol is and
thought about how we could represent all of the values that we had discussed
with the rest of the Inquiry group in our flag.
We thought about what colours could be used to show those values, like
blue can represent Freedom because the sky is blue and the sky has no
boundaries. A yellow sun could represent warmth and warmth can represent
friendship.
We researched symbols of
multiculturalism and sustainability and discovered that the best symbols were
the simple ones.
We experimented with different colours
and symbols by making paper flags and discovered that our shapes had to be
simple enough to be easily cut out of paper (and later fabric).
4. Keep
it simple, make it meaningful.
We talked about the differences between
good and bad flags. Good flags have no more than five colours, no more than 2
charges (shapes or symbols), no letters or numbers and can be easily recognised
from a distance. We came up with 2 rules to follow:
Keep
it simple
Make
it meaningful
We decided to choose a few important
values to work with and a few strong symbols: a leaf, a sun and a blue sky, and
chose 4 colours: blue, green, red and yellow.
5. So
many ideas!
Working with the limited symbols and
colours, we tried to put those symbols together in as many different ways as we
could think of. We came up with 31 different ways! To decide which design we
would make, we each chose 2 of our favourites and the Inquiry group voted for
the final design. We were a bit surprised by the one that the group chose- it
was one that we had all created together.
6. Sewing
the flag
The design that the group chose didn’t
have a sun in it and we all felt that the sun symbol was an important one so we
added a sun. We also added another colour, orange so that the sun and the leaf
could be distinct from each other. Taking turns to sew the main flag using a
sewing machine, we slowly put our flag together. While waiting for our turn at
the machine we each made a smaller flag in our favourite designs. Sewing took a very long time but was really
fun.
7. Flags
can be powerful
‘It’s easy at the start to
think of ideas but it gets harder when you have to make something’
‘You need no more than 5
colours’
‘Deciding which design to
use was hard’
‘Simple is hard’
Constitution
Group and the Celebration Group
Researched constitutions and listened to each other using interaction skills, including initiating ideas,
making positive statements and voicing disagreement in an appropriate manner,
speaking clearly and varying tone, volume and the children varied the
constitution sentence beginnings.
Sim
City Group
Together, the
children were assisted to address real global challenges such as climate
change, the search for renewable resources and natural disasters. They decided how
to collaborate to shape the world of tomorrow.
The National Anthem Group
The children were scaffolded to Identify,
reproduce and experiment with rhythmic, sound and word patterns in poems,
chants, rhymes and songs. The whole group talked about a play on words from
diversity to Divercity.
Research Viewing Reading Writing
The children viewed films on the use of
plasticine and learnt about scale and perspective from artists. They read books
about famous buildings throughout the ages.
All the children created short imaginative
narratives, informative and persuasive texts using growing knowledge of text structures and language features
for familiar and some less familiar audiences, selecting print and multimodal
elements appropriate to the audience and purpose. They
composed an invitation, wrote explanations, reflections and justified their
thoughts.
For the celebration and display, students published their composed texts, created images to support
the meaning of the texts. They accurately spelt
familiar words and attempted to spell less familiar words and used punctuation
accurately. They legibly wrote unjoined upper- and
lower-case letters when publishing.
When learning the songs “We are
Australian”, “Man in the mirror” and the original composition “Divercity”, the
students used comprehension strategies to build
literal and inferred meaning and began to analyse texts by drawing on a growing
knowledge of context, language and visual features and print and multimodal
text structures.
The children continuously shared their work
with each other throughout the process of this inquiry.
