Literacy in Year 6

This term, Year 6 students have been focusing on explanation texts. They have been tuning in with games requiring everyone to ‘explain’ their thinking, such as answering questions like, “Would you rather travel to every planet in the solar system or travel to every country in the world,” and then justifying their choices. The teachers have been somewhat surprised and incredibly impressed by the passion with which some students will throw their support behind holidaying at the ‘snow’ over the ‘beach’ or eating ‘potatoes’ over ‘eggs’. 

After tuning into the idea of explaining their thinking and providing strong reasons about these light-hearted topics, students have completed the writing process to create an original explanation text about a topic of interest to them. This began with brainstorming possible topics of interest and selecting specific ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions that they would like to investigate further. 

While researching, students were focusing on the reading skills of synthesising, analysing and critiquing. They were adding new information to their existing knowledge about their topic as well as synthesising from different sources including websites, news articles, books and videos. They were also analysing and critiquing the author’s voice, making judgements about authors’ biases and whether the information they were getting was factual, opinionative or written with an agenda to persuade.

The fabulous range of questions students came up with to explain in their reports, and interesting facts they found out included:

‘How did World War 1 start,’ from which Leo was surprised to find out that Germany first declared war on Russia because they were mobilising.

‘Why does giving the right blood type matter during a transfusion,’ from which Sanuli discovered that when the body detects the wrong blood type it will reject it. 

‘How do Greek Gods make up Greek Mythology,’ from which Cooper learned that Zeus is 13.8 billion years old. 

‘How does traveling faster than light affect you,” from which Andrew found it interesting that, “From an insider's point of view everything would appear normal when traveling faster than light, but from outside everything comes apart.”