Dear Families
Nativity’s work with Student Agency (continued)
This post we continue to look at the work that our students and teachers have been doing in Student Agency. The following work provides examples of the learning carried out in our Year 3/4 classrooms.
3/4R
In Year 3/4R students have unpacked the HASS achievement standards. With the learning focussed on ‘students describe the importance and role of local government, community members and laws, and the cultural and social factors that shape identity.’ ACARA
Students began researching the following:
• The levels of government
• What a government is/ does
• What are laws and rules?
What are the critical concepts?
• Laws verses rules
• Identity factors
• Democracy
What are the individual perspectives?
• Community members
• Self-identity
• How does our local member of parliament help our school?
• What different communities are we in? What do we bring to each community?
• Why do we need laws to be safe?
Students used Bloom’s taxonomy and investigated what each taxa meant. They selected one taxa and found synonyms to develop a deeper understanding. The following learning opportunities were created to allow students to describe the importance of local government and community members.
• Remembering: Write a short biography on our local government member with some things they have done for our community.
• Understanding: Write a short paragraph explaining why local government and involved community members are needed for a safe and active community.
• Applying: Role-play a scenario where students act out how they would interact with local government or community members to solve a community problem.
• Analysing: Compare the roles of local government officials and community members in a Venn diagram.
• Evaluating: Debate the effectiveness of a recent decision made by local government.
• Creating: Develop a proposal for a community project that involves collaboration between local government and community members.
Year 3/4C unpacked the Health achievement standards, “Students recognise strategies for managing change. They identify influences that strengthen identities. They investigate how emotional responses vary and understand how to interact positively with others in a variety of situations.” Acara
Students then investigated how they can recognise strategies for managing change. After a discussion, students were provided with three different scenarios of a possible change that may occur in their lives. They were spilt into three groups where they had to discuss their topic, how it would make them feel and different strategies they could do to help them from that change. The students had in depth conversations with their group and were able to clearly explain how they would feel and why.
Students were introduced the world of Blooms Taxonomy by watching a video on YouTube that explains each stage of the Blooms Taxonomy in the form of the movie ‘Lion King’.
Having watched the video students were able to explain Blooms Taxonomy. They then used their knowledge to start to co-construct their own Bloom’s Taxonomy into achievable and manageable steps.
3/4B
Students in 3/4B unpacked the achievement standard in English. Words and phrases were colour-coded the keywords or phrases, which helped the students to unpack the text. Students recorded their understanding of the achievement standard. The language and vocabulary awareness gained in this lesson was also transferred into other lessons where particularly “identify” is used quite regularly. Students have also used their knowledge of the achievement standards when discussing parables in Religious Education.
Students then used Blooms to construct success criteria around the Genre Writing unit, which focused on Narrative writing. The following suggestions of learning for each aspect of Blooms was created for students to select the way they would demonstrate their learning. We are looking forward to seeing the finished pieces of work.
Remember: List the text structures and language features you would see in an informative text.
Understand: Identify three informative texts and describe what elements are unique to information texts
Apply: Choose an information text and transform it so that it is suitable for an audience of 5-year-olds.
Analyse: Compare and contrast similarities and differences of an information text in based on multimodal deliveries.
Evaluate: Evaluate a peer’s informative text as to how well they have control over text structure, language features and the application of multimodal elements.
Create: Create your own informative text based on something you are passionate about, considering appropriate text structures and language features.
Students continue to make choices with their learning. Next time we will look into the learning occurring in our Year 5/6 classes. I would like to leave you with a thought… “The future belongs to the curious. The ones who are not afraid to try it, explore it, poke at it, question it, and turn it inside out.” Lovelle Drachman
Kind regards
Melinda James
