Activity Introduction
Quick summary: In this activity students learn about sustainability while building literacy by writing a persuasive text about greening public events and festivals. Students explore the concept of sustainability and write a letter to persuade the organisers of the Fun4Kids Festival to implement sustainable initiatives.
This year Cool Australia has partnered with the Fun4Kids Festival to run a creative writing challenge.
This activity is a great way to prepare students for NAPLAN writing tasks.
Learning goals for this activity include:
- Students will plan and write a persuasive text.
- Students engage in authentic learning with real life application.
- Students build literacy, critical and creative thinking and ethical understanding.
- Students connect classroom learning to a fun community event.
Australian Curriculum content descriptions:
Year 3 English: Plan, draft and publish imaginative, informative and persuasive texts demonstrating increasing control over text structures and language features and selecting print,and multimodal elements appropriate to the audience and purpose (ACELY1682)
Year 4 English: Plan, draft and publish imaginative, informative and persuasive texts containing key information and supporting details for a widening range of audiences, demonstrating increasing control over text structures and language features (ACELY1694)
Year 5 English: Plan, draft and publish imaginative, informative and persuasive print and multimodal texts, choosing text structures, language features, images and sound appropriate to purpose and audience (ACELY1704)
Year 6 English: Plan, draft and publish imaginative, informative and persuasive texts, choosing and experimenting with text structures, language features, images and digital resources appropriate to purpose and audience (ACELY1714)
Year 7 English: Plan, draft and publish imaginative, informative and persuasive texts, selecting aspects of subject matter and particular language, visual, and audio features to convey information and ideas (ACELY1725)
Year 8 English: Create imaginative, informative and persuasive texts that raise issues, report events and advance opinions, using deliberate language and textual choices, and including digital elements as appropriate (ACELY1736)
Year 9 English: Create imaginative, informative and persuasive texts that present a point of view and advance or illustrate arguments, including texts that integrate visual, print and/or audio features (ACELY1746)
Year 10 English: Create sustained texts, including texts that combine specific digital or media content, for imaginative, informative, or persuasive purposes that reflect upon challenging and complex issues (ACELY1756)
Syllabus Outcomes: EN2-2A, EN3-2A, EN4-4B, EN5-1A.
General capabilities: Literacy, Critical and creative thinking, Ethical understanding.
Cross curriculum priorities: Sustainability
Lesson duration: 45 minutes.
Teacher input: Assist students with persuasive writing task.
Resources needed: Fun4kids – Stimulus Page, writing materials, computer access for digital worksheets (if used), Persuasive Letter Writing Rubric Sheet.
Digital Learning opportunities: Teachers can share this lesson as a digital worksheet and get students to submit their letter to their Cool Australia personal dashboard for assessment.
Homework / extension opportunities: Students might like discussing their topics with their families at home; this would bring new ideas regarding the topic into the discussion.
Cool Australia’s curriculum team continually reviews and refines our resources to be in line with changes to the Australian Curriculum.
