f)+Unit+of+Work+Overview+and+Summary

The unit we have designed is an integrated English and HSIE unit focused on learning about the local community. In this unit students will explore the cultural customs and practices of the local community through collecting and presenting information in a number of ways. Students will examine how to effectively construct a factual recount (both written and spoken), including visual grammar and multimodal techniques that can be used to support information, for a specific audience and social purpose. Students will use resources including books, videos, interactive websites and images along with personal experiences to convey meaning to various audiences in varied forms including text, video, image and speech. By the end of the unit, students will produce texts that are well-structured (using the appropriate schematic structure of factual recounts) and well-presented (including supporting visual images).

· Identifies some significant customs, practices and traditions of their local community, beginning with Aboriginal people · Gives some reasons why their local community is different to others and why it is of value and should be respected · Identifies major community religions and places of religious significance in their communities, eg temple, church, synagogue, mosque · Locates and identifies evidence of the languages used in their local community, beginning with the original Aboriginal languages, eg signage, place names, sign language
 * CUS2.3 Explains how shared customs, practices, symbols, languages and traditions in communities contribute to Australian and community identities.**

Lesson 1 **__Introductory Lesson: Children's Festival of Australia- Bankstown, Sydney.__**
 * CUS2.3 Explains how shared customs, practices, symbols, languages and traditions in communities contribute to Australian and community identities. **

** RS2.5 Reads independently a wide range of texts on increasingly challenging topics and justifies own interpretation of ideas, information and events. ** This lesson is created purely to introduce the outcomes of the Unit as well as a specific lesson focus. In this lesson, students' previous knowledge is evoked through questioning and discussion with the aid of the YouTube video. The video is set in their local community of Bankstown so there are also familiar tones throughout the lesson to create a great foundation to new learning. It runs for 7 minutes so it can be stopped at various intervals to discuss and question certain features and content. Students are enlightened to the new topic and about how the video portrays meaning and a particular message; Multiculturalism, Cultural Diversity and the features of a video. || and justifies own interpretation of ideas, information and events. ** Lesson 2 is a follow-up to the Introductory lesson. As the previous lesson provoked students' previous knowledge and uncovered some broad information on the HSIE topic and what English features help portray this, Lesson 2 focusses in on the English aspect of portraying meaning through Discussion.Using extra information on Discussions and visual features such as audio, image, performance and music, in small groups, students produce a list of features that convey a certain meaning and how they contribute to compile the complete meaning and purpose of the video. The activity is open to students' own interpretations and are offered the opportunity to justify their choices. || Lesson 3 has been organised so that students can deepen and broaden their cultural understanding of Bankstown through having first hand interactions and experiences with the local community. Students will be taken on an excursion to various areas in the community which can be travelled to by foot including the local shopping district, natural habitats (parks and rivers) and some of the religious buildings. Students will be organised into groups equipped with cameras so that records of the visits to various sites can be recorded visually. Students will also complete a mapping activity which features boxes to sketch images of the sites visited and lines to record their personal experiences which can contribute to activities featured in following lessons. || This lesson is designed to improve and familiarise students with written grammar through independent, draft compositions of factual recounts. Students will engage with factual recounts presented in //The history of Bankstown: From settlement to city// (Bankstown City Council, 2003) and in groups will identify their various components and features of recounts including time, place and evaluation of events. In addition students will discuss the purposes and potential audiences of recounts and how this influences the content of the text. Students will use this information and draw links with the HSIE unit on Our Community: Bankstown to guide them in composing their own draft factual recounts. To assess acquired understanding, students will be assessed on their ability to restructure factual recounts appropriately. || Following a lesson on factual recounts, this lesson further develops on student knowledge by providing students the opportunity to revise the structural features of a recount through a group activity. This activity requires students to order the various features of a factual recount including introduction, conclusion and appropriate sequencing. Students will also be made aware of other features introduced in the prior lesson including adjectives, complex noun groups and time, place and evaluative elements. Using the structure and supplementary information on recounts, students will work on editing and their own recounts and the recounts of others before producing a published copy. ||
 * Lesson 2
 * RS2.5 Reads independently a wide range of texts on increasingly challenging topics
 * Lesson 3
 * __ Bankstown: learning and interacting with the community __**
 * CUS2.3 Explains how shared customs, practices, symbols, languages and traditions in communities contribute to Australian and community identities. **
 * Lesson 4
 * __ Written Grammar: Factual Recount __**
 * Lesson 5
 * __ Factual Recounts: Editing and Publishing __**
 * WS2.9 Drafts, revises, proofreads and publishes well-structured texts that are more demanding in terms of topic, audience and written language features. **
 * Lesson 6
 * __ Visual Grammar: __** **__ Interactive meanings of offer and demand __**
 * RS2.7 Discusses how writers relate to their readers in different ways, how they create a variety of worlds through language and how they use language to achieve a wide range of purposes. **

In this lesson, students will be exploring the ways that visual representations can support text through matching image to text and learning about the deeper meaning which can be drawn from visual images through ‘offer and demand’. Students will not only discuss but also engage with the concepts of offer and demand through viewing and interpreting images. Students will use digital cameras and viewfinders to record images of offer and demand including various concepts of angle, shot length and colour. Students will be assessed on their abilities to match image to text and the degree to which offer and demand is appropriately represented. || WS2.10 Produces texts clearly, effectively and accurately, using the sentence structure, grammatical features and punctuation conventions of the text type.
 * WS2.10 Produces texts clearly, effectively and accurately, using the sentence structure, grammatical features and punctuation conventions of the text type. **
 * Lesson 7
 * __ ICT: Using images to support textual meaning __**

WS2.12 Uses joined letters when writing in NSW Foundation Style and demonstrates basic desktop publishing skills on the computer.

Lesson 7 again provides students’ opportunities to further develop upon content and concepts established in lesson 6. Students will have an ICT lesson where they will be typing up their published factual recounts, designing visual images incorporating concepts of offer and demand and how they contribute to the meaning intended in their written texts. Students will be subject to teacher questioning and be assessed on the extent to which they can match text to image and appropriately justify the reasons for this. ||
 * Lesson 8
 * __ Multimodal Texts – Using different communication modes to convey meaning __**
 * RS2.7 Discusses how writers relate to their readers in different ways, how they create a variety of worlds through language and how they use language to achieve a wide range of purposes. **

WS2.13 Discusses how own texts are adjusted to relate to different readers, how they develop the subject matter and how they serve a wide variety of purposes This lesson is designed for students to look at different modes of representation through learning about multimodal texts and how they convey meaning. Students will engage with an interactive website on the local community and subsequently describe different ways that information is conveyed through various visual techniques (building upon prior lessons) and how this contributes to meaning. It is intended that students will develop a familiarity with the concept of multimodality through class discussion and interaction with the resource provided and use this acquired knowledge to create a multimodal text which encourages people to visit the local Bankstown community. Students will be expected to not only create a multimodal text but to also justify the various multimodal features presented. || Multimodality: Exploring multimodal techniques in film and documentary style videos Lesson 9 further engages students in broadening their understanding of multimodal techniques and features through the use of resource 1 featuring information on the influence of culture on society in Australia. Students will view the videos and identify the various multimodal features through an interactive task. The teacher will label a number of the multimodal attributes and put them in a ‘mystery box’, when she/he draws out a multimodal feature, students will have to identify where this is represented in the video and outline how it contributes to the overall meaning conveyed by the documentary. Following this activity, students will select one of the multimodal features and write a short description with an accompanying image as to how it was used in the video to convey meaning. || = Scaffolding: Preparing students for the production of documentary video = Lesson 10 develops upon knowledge acquired in lesson 9. Students will watch the documentary featured in resource 4 and discuss how the multimodal features displayed are significant for a documentary and how they work together to create meaning. Students will watch the video again whilst independently taking notes on the function of multimodal techniques featured in the documentary. Students will discuss their findings then be introduced to their following task, creating a documentary. The class will discuss what features are necessary for a documentary and how multimodal features can be included. Students will then be placed in groups where they will be given a procedure to follow which scaffolds them in their documentary making preparations. || Summary In conclusion this unit provides students with an engaging set of learning experiences in an integrated approach to encourage students in developing an understanding of the various multicultural factors which contribute to the existing communities in Australian society and the various features of visual, written and multimodal texts. This understanding will better enable students to read the given meaning in texts and equip them with skills and abilities to interpret meanings of greater ambiguity. In addition, it is evident that the development of these skills will contribute to students abilities to compose texts of varied natures.
 * WS2.9 Drafts, revises, proofreads and publishes well-structured texts that are more demanding in terms of topic, audience and written language features.**
 * Lesson 9
 * RS2.7 Discusses how writers relate to their readers in different ways, how they create a variety of worlds through language and how they use language to achieve a wide range of purposes. **
 * Lesson 10
 * WS2.13 Discusses how own texts are adjusted to relate to different readers, how they develop the subject matter and how they serve a wide variety of purposes. **