Resource+5+-+scaffolding+the+multimodal+text

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__**Description of Resource:**__ This resource is a YouTube video. This particular video is a stop motion animation focusing on the water cycle. It is aimed for use in primary school educational units and as such uses simple text and images to describe the water cycle. It models a simple form of multimodal text that students could recreate in a unit based on the water cycle.

__**Relevance to the Unit Outcome:**__ This stop motion animation allows the students to see a simplified version of how the water cycle works. It clearly demonstrates to the students the way in which plants (living things) interact with their environment and contribute to that environment in terms of the water cycle. This directly relates to the Science and Technology unit outcome LTS2.3 and indicators.

By being simplistic in nature, the students can engage with the video as a way to have information presented to them that is different to a textbook approach. However, it still allows the students to ask questions about the topic or want to explore and add to the information they have seen in the animation.

__**Aspect of Literacy:**__ As the stop motion animation is a multimodal text it allows the students to see an example of one type of multimodal text and also allows them to explore multiliteracies. Specifically, it lets the students see how images, text and music have worked together to portray a particular meaning.

This animation allows students to use it as a model in ways to “apply new understandings in authentic contexts” (Groundwater-Smith, Ewing & Le Cornu, 2007, p. 144) by creating their own multimodal text based on the knowledge they have gained from learning about different types of literacy. This becomes increasingly important when teaching students literacy as Callow (1999) states that visual literacy and multiliteracies are, in fact, heavily ground in cultural contexts (pp. 82 – 83). By allowing students to explore multimodal texts with their own cultural context as well as the understandings their teacher has equipped them with, we can teach our students to become “resistant readers of all texts … so that they can challenge them and understand and interpret” (Groundwater-Smith et al., 2007, p. 145) the different literacies they will encounter in their everyday lives.

By introducing a simplistic animation to model to the students on the type of multimodal text they will be creating allow the students to engage with their imaginations when it comes to creating an animation for themselves. “It is the //literacy of the imagination// that lies at the heart of the process and practice of literacy in all its forms” (Winch et al., 2006, p. 434)

__**References:**__ Callow, J. (1999). Reading the visual: An introduction. //Image Matters – Visual Texts in the Classroom.// J. Callow. Marickville, N.S.W., Primary English Teaching Association: 1-13.

Groundwater-Smith, S., Ewing, R., & Le Cornu, R. (2007). //Teaching: challenges and dilemmas.//(3rd ed.). Victoria: Harcourt Australia.

Winch, G., Johnston, R., March, P., Ljungdahl, L., & Holliday, M. (2006). // Literacy: reading, writing and children’s literature // (3rd ed.). Melbourne: Oxford University Press.