Enriching Literacy Development Through a Fictional Story (picture book) with a Citizenship Learning Context

OUR CURRENT LEARNING:

Welcome back our CCE focus is now being developed through literacy.

We are going to use the picture book: What if everybody did that by Ellen Javernick to investigate: 

·  Why rules are important, the consequences of rules not being followed and who makes the rules?

We are using a picture book because literacy is a part of the Australian Curriculum English learning area and the General Capabilities. Our literacy focus is:

·  Visual knowledge 

WHY WE ARE LEARNING THIS?

Understanding rules and their consequences contributes to informed and active citizenship and broader Civics goals, outlined in the Melbourne Declaration (2008): students will ‘act with moral and ethical integrity’.

‘Reading for understanding is central to HASS’ (Gilbert and Hoepper, 2017, p. 155) and using picture books allows students to see how text and illustrations support each other and how illustrations may add additional information or even different perspectives from what is in the text.

HOW WE ARE APPROACHING OUR LEARNING?

We want to approach the picture book in a way that promotes engaged and active citizenship and develops our literacy goal.  

We will read, What if everybody did that, together.

Scaffolding and modelling will then help students to construct their own texts purposefully around our Civics outcome.

Lynch (1992) states, role play support CCE learning. To engage students we will use role play after our first reading to look at the rules being ignored and the consequences.

As a class we will then look at each rule being ignored and brainstorm who made the rule or where does the rule come from? For an inclusive approach, we will also encourage students from an ATSI or migrant background to share other perspectives on rules and who made them.

Next, how our literacy objective is embedded in this Civics activity. We want students to focus on looking at the explicit and implicit meaning in a text (Lohrey, 1998), especially the connection between text and images.

When students understand how this text is constructed to share its messages of responsibilities, why we need rules and the consequences of not following rules; together we will look at actioning, using the text.

Our approach will be collaborative between the students and the teacher to explore options suggested by the text:

Our aim in this Civics unit is to share our presentations with the class and beyond because Civics outcomes benefit from having an authentic audience (Gilbert and Hoepper, 2017).  Our learning outcomes are embedded in the presentation choice student make because they need to include in their work: why we have rules, the consequences for not following them and who made these rules:

HOW YOU CAN SUPPORT YOUR CHILD’S LEARNING IN THIS UNIT:

Talk: about rules in context and who made them as they arise at home, in the community and other locations. 

Share: YouTube has a reading of: What if everybody did that by Ellen Javernick. Our classroom has copies of the book for student home loan.

KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS LEARNING

Here are the specific Year 3 knowledge and skills outcomes from the Australian Curriculum.

REFERENCES 

Australian Curriculum And Assessment Reporting Authority [ACARA], (2017). HASS year three. Retrieved from: https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/humanities-and-social-sciences/

Australian Curriculum And Assessment Reporting Authority [ACARA], (2017). English year three. Retrieved from: https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/english/

Gilbert, R., & Hoepper, B. (Eds.). (2017). Teaching Humanities and Social Sciences: History, Geography, Economics and Citizenship (6th edn.). Southbank, VIC: Cengage Learning.

Javernick, E. (2010). What if everybody did that?. Seattle, United States: Amazon Publishing

Lohrey, A. (1998). Critical literacy: A professional development resource. Lanugage Australia, Melbourne.

Lynch (1992) in Gilbert, R., & Hoepper, B. (Eds.). (2017). Teaching Humanities and Social Sciences: History, Geography, Economics and Citizenship (6th edn.). Southbank, VIC: Cengage Learning.

Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians. (2008). Retrieved from http://www.curriculum.edu.au/verve/_resources/National_Declaration_on_the_Educational_Goals_for_Young_Australians.pdf