My Place (1988), available from  http://www.walkerbooks.com.au/Books/Walker-Classics-My-Place-9781921150654 , is a picture book written by Nadia Wheatley and illustrated by Donna Rawlins. The story focuses on one area in Australia and travels back in time 200 years from 1988 to 1788, with many different children describing their lives and their surrounding community over time. With each child's story, only some aspects oe the area such as the fig tree remain the same, while everything else seems to change around them.

Description of Site:

This teacher resource is fantastic for teaching Stage 2 HSIE in relation to cause and effect of community change. Classroom ideas are divided according to educational themes, and I feel the ‘Connecting with the Land, Environment and History’ section would be most valuable to approaching my topic area in the classroom.

Teaching Ideas:

This resource provides multiple opportunities for students to develop their skills working with maps and timelines, which would allow a visual representation of community change throughout the book. I would suggest first mapping changes in the community within My Place, before then considering the students’ own community. Students could use Google Maps to examine different areas of their local or school community, and either visit their local library or look up map archives to view geographical change over time. Beyond this, students could begin to consider the effects of such changes, and what that might mean for the local community in the future.

This resource also has potential links to Aboriginal history, as students could be asked to research and map their local Indigenous history on a timeline.

Differentiation Activity:

When working with multiple ability levels, an extension for this timeline activity could be to view an episode of the 26-part ABC series based on this book and complete a worksheet.

For example,

http://www.myplace.edu.au/themes/culture.html has a number of clips students can view regarding local culture and change, before completing a resource sheet to challenge their thinking.

Some nice ideas for a problem-based approach to learning about Migration. Drive the inquiry with an effective and essential question and design authentic tasks to deepen understanding.

Some nice ideas for a problem-based approach to learning about Migration. Drive the inquiry with an effective and essential question and design authentic tasks to deepen understanding.

Creating a classroom newspaper around a social or environmental issue or a history topic is an authentic way to address both literacy and curriculum outcomes in HSIE K-6. This website has a range of free downloadable templates of newspapers. Classroom newspapers can be paper-based or published online.

For further research and teaching ideas go to to:

http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=lund/index.html

Abstract: This article describes a project in which the reality of newspaper production was integrated into the language arts curriculum in a second-grade classroom. The class newspaper was produced in both hard copy and multimedia versions, using The Student Writing Center software and HyperStudio on a single classroom computer. The difficulties and successes of the project are described.

http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/creating-classroom-newspaper-249.html

A great way to combine literacy and history.

They're realistic and the best part, they are FREE! A great resource to use when writing news articles in the primary classroom.