Good to Great Schools Australia (GGSA) has launched a writing unit for Year 5 students exploring themes related to the 2023 Referendum while building persuasive writing skills. 

Oz-e-writing Year 5 Persuasive (Civics) includes everything teachers need to effectively teach the subject, including: 

 Lesson presentations structured from I Do > We Do > You Do

 Teaching Guide with step-by-step instructions

 Student Workbook with engaging activities

 Assessment framework including four progress tests and end-of-unit assessment. 

Explore The Voice and related civics themes in an age-appropriate way.

Oz-e-writing Year 5 Persuasive (Civics) enables teachers to explore themes relevant to the 2023 Referendum in a non-biased but positive way. 

Topics covered from lessons 1 to 45 

– The Australian Constitution 
– Democracy
– Foundational Maps of Australia
– State and Territory Parliaments and Voting 
– The Federal Parliament 
– The Federal Parliament and Compulsory Voting 
– Citizenship 
– Being a Citizen 
– The High Court 
– The Voice 

It aligns to the Australian Curriculum V9:

• Describe how spoken, written and multimodal texts use language features and are typically organised into characteristic stages and phases, depending on purposes in texts (AC9E5LA03)

• Use appropriate interaction skills including paraphrasing and questioning to clarify meaning, make connections to own experience, and present and justify an opinion or idea (AC9E5LY02)

• Navigate and read texts for specific purposes, monitoring meaning using strategies such as skimming, scanning and confirming (AC9E5LY04).

• Use comprehension strategies such as visualising, predicting, connecting, summarising, monitoring and questioning to build literal and inferred meaning to evaluate information and ideas (AC9E5LY05).

• Plan, create, edit and publish written and multimodal texts whose purposes may be imaginative, informative and persuasive, developing ideas using visual features, text structure appropriate to the topic and purpose, text connectives, expanded noun groups, specialist and technical vocabulary, and punctuation including dialogue punctuation (AC9E5LY06)

• The key values and features of Australia’s democracy, including elections, and the roles and responsibilities of elected representatives (AC9HS5K06).

• How citizens (members of communities) with shared beliefs and values work together to achieve a civic goal (AC9HS5K07).

Oz-e-writing is Australia’s only English writing program featuring explicit instruction. 

 built on the international body of evidence on how students learn best

 explicitly teaches writing skills with detailed scaffolding & alignment of learning progressions

 explicitly identifies text structures and language features

 progresses from sentences level construction to paragraphs to full texts

 lessons are sequenced and structured to consolidate and master critical content. 

Build real-world writing skills while exploring The Voice and the 2023 Referendum

 builds students’ understanding of the power of writing 

 provides real-life contexts for students to apply their writing skills

 develops students’ interpreting, analysing and evaluating skills

 builds students’ understanding of the content, the purpose of writing, and the audience so they can construct quality texts

 gives students the skills, strategies, knowledge and understanding to be confident, successful writers

 develops students’ ability to navigate less familiar texts and structure and sequence their writing to persuade.

Includes ‘The Constitution’ song 

While developing this unit, Good to Great Schools Australia (GGSA) curriculum team members wanted to include a song about the Australian Constitution, but they couldn’t find one. 

Instead they used The Constitution by US singer Ted Hawkins as inspiration,  adapting the lyrics to reflect the Australian context, specially for Oz-e-writing Year 5 Persuasive (Civics). 

The song has since been professionally recorded by musicians from the Hope Vale community, for students at their school where this curriculum is developed. 

This song is used as an exemplar text in week one of Oz-e-writing Year 5 Persuasive (Civics).