Investigating light
Teacher Anne Girven
| YEAR
|
LEVEL
|
DURATION
|
| 7-8
|
4
|
3-4 weeks
|
| Achievement Objective Being Assessed
|
Learning Outcomes
|
Transactional Writing
Write instructions, explanations, and factual accounts, and express and explain a point of view, in a range of authentic contexts.
|
Write an explanation based on the information from investigations, eg. explaining how light helps us see. Organising and linking ideas logically and making language choices appropriate to the audience.
|
| Processes
|
| Exploring Language
|
Identify, discuss and use the conventions, structures, and language features of different texts, and discuss how they relate to the topic.
|
| Processing Information
|
Gather, select, record, interpret, and present coherent, structured information from a variety of sources, using different technologies and explaining the processes used
|
| Supporting Achievement Objective
|
Learning Outcomes
|
| Close Reading
|
Discuss language, meanings, and ideas in a range of texts, relating their understanding to experiences, purposes, audience, and other texts.
|
| Science
|
Making Sense of the Physical World
Investigate and offer explanations for commonly experienced physical phenomena and compare their ideas with scientific ideas, eg. light
|
Students demonstrate their understanding how light travels by predicting, investigating, observing and drawing a diagram. Understand how light helps people see, eg. draw a diagram showing how light travels from the sun to help a person see.
|
Teacher background reading
Teaching and learning activities
Select and adapt these learning activities to best meet the needs of your students, and to fit the time available:
Set up a learning centre. Collect books from school library, the National Library
and school journals. Display a vocabulary chart and add to this throughout the unit.
Learning task 1
Learning task 2
Learning task 3
Assessment
Assessment Task
Student Writing - Explanations
Explain to the students the learning intentions for this task.
Students work in groups to show and explain the different aspects of light they have researched and experimented with. Encourage students to talk about what they have found out about light. Reread the modeled writing. Students brainstorm and draft their own explanation include diagrams / illustrations. Complete the student checklist
.
Conference with a buddy or the teacher. Edit and proof read.
For customisable student check-lists, see these Assessment Resource Bank resources:
Publish and present to the class.
assessment (RTF 4KB)
self_level3 (RTF 10KB)
self_level4 (RTF 10KB)
self_level5 (RTF 12KB)
Resources
Electronic
Print
- Derewianka, B. (1990). Exploring How Texts Work. Sydney: Primary Teaching Association
- Explanations (p 57)
- Summary of Text Features (p 60-62)
- Use of Nouns - Explanations (p 64-65)
- Wing Jan, L. (1991) Write Ways: Modelling Writing Forms. Melbourne: Oxford University Press
- Explanations/Learning Experiences (p 50)
- Activities Explanations (p 52-57)
- Knapp, P. & Watkins, W. (1994) Context - Text - Grammar. NSW: Text productions
- Explanations (p 76-77)
- Structure of Explanations (p 78-80)
- Structure and Grammar (p 86-87)
- Scaffolding (p 87)
- Grammatical Features (p 81-83)
- Tips for Teaching Explanations (p 85)
