Celebrations & Symbols

My name is Brianna O’Reilly, and I am in my final year of a junior primary/primary teaching degree. I have previously completed a Bachelor of International Studies, with honours in Asian Studies and majoring in Japanese. I think language learning is a very important part of primary education, and so I hope to share my passion and interest for Japanese with my students. The full potential of learning a second language is not being reached at the moment, and I think by integrating languages with other learning areas students and teachers will begin to understand how important they are.

Rationale for Inquiry –

How do celebrations and symbols reveal people’s values and culture?

Year 3 and 4 – working towards Standard 2

I have chosen to base this inquiry on celebrations and symbols, as I think this is a ‘fun’ way of introducing students to other cultures, and helping them understand the diversity of people in Australia. This unit could be used leading up to a major celebration such as Christmas or Easter, and be an efficient way to incorporate those events into learning time. Although I have only listed Japanese, Society & Environment and English as the learning areas involved in this inquiry unit, it could also be extended to involve areas such as Art and Mathematics.

There are four stages to this Integrated Learning Plan, and they can be accessed as read-only Google Documents.

Stage 1 – Inquiry Overview & Desired Results

Stage 2 – Acceptable Evidence of Knowledge 

(including written assessment task and self-rating using Quality Teaching Framework)

Stage 3 – The Learning Plan

Stage 4a – Individual Lesson Plan incorporating a Web 2.0 tool

Stage 4b – Individual Lesson Plan incorporating a Learning Object