Teacher notes
For each China learning sequence there are three activities to engage students. These can be completed as a sequence of learning or teachers may choose to have students complete different activities depending on curriculum program, student achievement level and time available in class.
Access to Scootle digital content
Digital content has been incorporated into these learning sequences to support student learning.
A link is provided to open each of these Scootle resources.
You need to login to Scootle to access the digital content in these learning sequences.
Look to Learn for ongoing engagement and inquiry
Look to Learn uses short immersion activities to draw students into the key themes and concepts through the use of rich digital content and a range of thinking prompts or questions.
The main idea behind the Look to Learn activities is for students to develop more sophisticated critical thinking skills when they engage in focused analysis of one artefact and apply a small set of thinking routines that "make their thinking visible."
Thinking Routines are one of the core approaches developed by Project Zero at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. This early work has been progressed by Professor Ron Ritchhart at Cultures of Thinking.
Images are used throughout these activities. The following additional resources are available to support image analysis.
Reading images
Knowledge building for developing deeper understanding
Knowledge Building activities enable students to delve more deeply into the topic. Through access to key resources, students explore the topic in more depth, engage in research and conduct greater analysis of the resources through compare and contrast. Where appropriate students are encouraged to use ICT as part of their learning process.
WebQuests for challenge-based problem learning
When students and teachers want to extend and enrich learning, authentic and rich challenges help focus students on transforming information into new understanding through creative problem-solving. A long-standing eLearning approach is the WebQuest construct. In each of the WebQuests, the significant activity is referred to as "The Challenge" that requires students to create a new understanding or justify a new viewpoint.
Additional notes
These learning sequences rely on the rich content generously made available to educators and students in Australia.
Throughout many of the activities, the longstanding work of the Harvard Project Zero team on Artful and Visible Thinking has been embedded. Particularly Thinking Routines prompt much of the learning in the Look to Learn and some Knowledge Building activities.
The Year 6 sequences depend on the Harvest of Endurance Scroll © National Museum of Australia 2003-2010 – The National Museum of Australia.
Most of the archival resources come from the rich collection hosted through the National Digital Learning Resources Network and accessed through a variety of means by students and teachers across Australia. Each educational jurisdiction can view the resources once logged into the appropriate portal. Although the direct links come from the Scootle interface for the Learning Federation, the NDLRN's "resolver" will present the correct links once you are logged-in.