Overview+and+Summary+of+the+Unit+of+Work

**__Overview and Summary of the Unit of Work:__**
Introduce students to the idea of making their interactive wiki on various celebrations. The first nine lessons in this unit will act as a backward mapping process towards the culminating task at the end of the unit- the wiki. Show students the basic functions of a Wiki. Students will be given the chance to have a teacher guided Wiki lesson. || Revise with students the rules for being on the computers and also quickly revise how to take notes from readings. Remind students that they need to read as much information as they can about their celebration and when they come to a point that they think might interesting, relevant, important etc they should stop and write this bit of information down. At the conclusion of the lesson have students stick their sheets into their writing books and then write in their reflection journal about what they learnt in todays lesson, what they would like to know more about, if they liked the lesson, what they didn’t like about the lesson etc. || ( focus: independant writing) || This lesson will serve as the summative assessment for the unit of work 'celebrations', bringing together the aspects of the unit of work in a resource that students will be able to show to their families and that can be published on the school website. ||
 * Lesson One: || I ntroduce students to the idea of the topic of 'celebrations'. Brainstorm why people celebrate different types of celebration . Students will work in small groups to create a list of celebrations that are important to them in the year, the whole class will build a calendar with all the important celebration dates on it. Students will talk about why different people celebrate different days and events and consider some of the issues for schools in deciding what days to celebrate.
 * Lesson Two: || Start off by telling students that todays lesson will take place in the library/on computers and that they will be researching a celebration of their choice. Ask students to select one celebration that they would like to research in further detail. The student will tell the teacher what celebration they have decided on and the teacher will make note of this. (Note: students can not research birthdays, Australia Day or NAIDOC week as these celebrations will be covered by the teacher in the next few lessons). Once this is done the class will go to the library so that each student has access to their own computer. With teacher supervision the students will be able to use books and the computer to find out as much information as they can about their celebration. The teacher will explain to the students that they will be using the information they gather from their research today to write an information report, but they wont be writing their information report until next week (lesson 4) so they need to make sure they make really detailed notes during todays lesson. Give students the ‘mind map’ handout (appendix 1) and ‘information on a celebration’ sheet (appendix 2) and tell them that they need to record their information on these sheets. The ‘mind map’ sheet will help students to record the big ideas/themes associated with their celebration which they will be able to use when writing their information report. This will allow them to see at a glance some of the general ideas and facts about their chosen celebration. The ‘information of a celebration’ sheet helps students to record more detailed information about their celebration and acts as a prompt to remind students about what kind of information they should be writing down. Students will also be able to use this sheet to help them write their information report.
 * Lesson Three: || In this lesson the teacher will show an example of an information report on celebrations, will model how to write an information report using the 'think aloud' strategy and finally will work with the students to jointly construct an information report on the Australia Day celebration. Students will explore key grammatical features of information reports such as structure, use of technical terms, word families etc with the goal of being able to write their own independent information report in the next lesson. The purpose of this lesson is to have students become familiar with information reports so that they can be successful in writing their own information report that will be included in their Wiki. ||
 * Lesson Four: || In this lesson,using their research from Lesson Two, students independently write an information report on their celebration. Students will now have the competence to do this as they would have just learnt about writing information reports in the previous lesson. During this lesson the teacher will monitor the class and assist where required. This may involve reminding students about key grammatical features of the information report. At end of lesson students will hand in a first draft of their information report to the to teacher. The teacher will mark this first draft according to their decided criteria and will then select a common grammatical feature that needs attention to focus on in the subsequent lesson.
 * Lesson Five: || This lesson will focus be focussing on grammar in writing. The teacher will design a lesson in which they reinforce a key grammatical feature of an Information Report. The focus of the lesson will be on adjectives and descriptive writing in Information Reports. The students will be given a chance to look at various Information Reports and try to identify adjectives, explain their importance, add adjectives to texts including their own. ||
 * Lesson Six: || After participating in the previous lesson on adjectives and descriptive writing students and making adjustments to their writing- students will use this lesson to write their final draft of their celebration information report. They will use comments and feedback from the teacher to finalise and correct any errors on their first draft. The teacher will monitor and assist during this lesson and answer any final questions that the students may have. ||
 * Lesson Seven: || In this lesson, students will be introduced to three elements of visual literacy; colour, vectors and salience. Through exploring modelled and guided examples of visual texts, including websites and poster/screensaver about Chinese New Year, students will explore how to locate the target elements of the visual texts and begin creating an understanding of the purpose for each within certain visual text types. Students will work in groups to locate target visual elements in given texts and report back to the class discussing how the elements work to make the text effective. ||
 * Lesson Eight: || Building on lesson 7/10, students will individually create a webpage (on paper) about a celebration of their choice (based on their writing). Students will use the knowledge about salience, vectors and colour in creating visual texts to design a webpage that will capture the attention of their target audience and convey their message about their chosen celebration. Students will use images from magazines and printed from the internet which they will have brought with them from home. Teacher will ensure students are reminded of each of the explored elements of visual texts with an introduction activity where students will contribute to creating a webpage on the IWB about Sydney New Years Eve fireworks using pre-prepared images and adding in headings, being sure to carefully select and arrange the images and text in a manner that will most suit the purpose of the text (see lesson 8 appendix below). ||
 * Lesson Nine: || This lesson will have students combining the components of their visual text and their information report about their chosen celebration. Students will combine the information and the text in an interesting manner and present this to the class in a short presentation at the conclusion of the lesson. Students will explain how the visual text they have created works to supplement the written information about their celebration, and vice versa. ||
 * Lesson Ten: || This lesson takes place in the computer laboratory at school and will be continued over another lesson if students do not complete the task within the 50minute lesson. Students work individually to create a wiki page that will be a part of a whole class wiki called 'Celebrations'. Note: Students will have previous experience with wikis and how to make wiki pages, thus allowing the focus of this lesson to be in compiling a visual component and a written component of information about their chosen celebration. Students will use information from their information report as well as images from the internet and from other electronic devices to create an engaging, informative and interesting wiki page.


 * __Appendices for unit of work:__**
 * __Lesson 2 Appendices__**


 * __Lesson Five Appendices:__**






 * __Lesson 8__**

Image from: http://media02.hongkiat.com/fireworks/OperaSydney-Fuegos2006-342289398.jpg.jpg

Image from: http://www.lolinks.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/1309210826-27.jpg

Image from: http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/fireworks-9.jpg

Image from: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Taipei_New_Year_Fireworks.jpg


 * __Marking Rubric for completed Wiki:__**