Te Kete Ipurangi Navigation:

Te Kete Ipurangi
Communities
Schools

Te Kete Ipurangi user options:



Literacy Online. Every child literate - a shared responsibility.
Ministry of Education.

Differentiation between the writing standards at year 7 and 8

Martin’s year 7 and 8 students are taking part in the NIWA science fair. In this case study, Martin discusses how the learning context provides several authentic writing tasks, including the development of a reflective journal. He describes how he differentiates between writing that meets the demands of the curriculum at year 7 and at year 8.

In this video, Martin describes the science context for the writing task. He discusses the teaching and learning involved as students develop scientific investigations.

The students carry out an investigation on a topic of interest and display their findings at the NIWA science fair. The investigation includes the application of a scientific process of fair testing to establish the validity of the conclusions. This learning context provides several opportunities for authentic writing, in particular, procedural writing and the recording of observations, ideas, hypotheses, responses, and conclusions in a reflective journal.

Curriculum links

Learning areas:

  • Science: level 4, investigating in science
  • English: level 4, Writing: purposes and audiences

Key competencies: participating and contributing, thinking

Related teaching and learning activities

Martin sparked the students’ curiosity and engagement by demonstrating several experiments to the whole class and then setting up shared experiments that the students worked on in pairs or small groups. As the students worked, he prompted and questioned them to discuss and develop hypotheses.

Published on: 18 Oct 2011




Footer: