English learning experiences

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.