C)+Resource+3

**Resource 3**

** Explanation of resource ** This resource has been extracted from the Woodlands Junior School website. It identifies and outlines a range of festivals and celebrations from all around the world, predominant of different religions and cultures. It incorporates a range of features which are easily accessible, providing links about major world religions, a Multifaith calendar 2010 and a range of symbols representative of each religion.

** Relevance to the outcome ** This website is extremely beneficial in describing a range of belief systems which are present within a variety of communities around the world, exploring HSIE learning outcomes related to Culture. Through the identification of major world religions, the website explores religious groups, forms of spirituality and provides information about religious celebrations (Board of Studies, 2006, p.29).These identified features of various religious groups can be linked to those which are present within the school community, as well as the wider local community. The incorporation of religious symbols allows students to explore visual literacy and the meaning portrayed within a range of images. Such stimulus also serves as a catalyst for designing lessons where students can develop on their writing, speaking and listening skills through a range of interactive tasks. Providing students with such vast learning opportunities will appropriately equip them for their final multi-modal task.

** Aspects of literacy suitable to be explored ** This resource, through its abundance of images, allows students to explore concepts related to visual literacy. Each section of the website displays effective use of symbols in accordance with written text relating to specific religions. This allows for exploration related to the significance of visual literacy, creating lessons which provide students with the opportunity to acquire ‘the ability to interpret images as well as to generate images for communicating ideas and concepts’ (Stokes, n.d., p.10). The site serves as a beneficial stimulus where students can develop skills in analysing ‘the power of an image and the how of its meaning in a particular context ‘(Winch, Johnston, March, Ljungdahl & Holliday, 2007, p.519). In this case students are determining the power of religious symbols and their significance. Engaging with such images assists students with the development of cognitive and operational knowledge and skills (Callow, 2006, p.9). Lessons that focus on visual elements additionally encourage students to explore common features of these including representational, interactive and compositional aspects that make images meaningful forms of literacy (Unsworth, 2001, p.72.) This site is also beneficial in exploring written forms of literacy with the multiple inclusions of factual descriptions throughout the website. The resource is useful in ‘describing characteristic features of particular’ world religions, making it useful in equipping students with the knowledge and understanding necessary for compiling their own descriptions (Droga & Humphrey, 2008, p.133). The resource displays abundant grammatical features which are common of descriptive text types. This includes the use of particular nouns where vocabulary relating to world religions is explored, such as ‘Judaism’, ‘Ramadan’, ‘Prophet Muhammad’ etc. Another common feature is the incorporation of detailed noun groups that help to describe features or characteristics (Droga & Humphrey, 2008, p. 133) e.g. ‘__multifaith__ calendar’, ‘__the Hebrew leader__ Abraham’, ‘__the five oldest main__ religions’ etc. Relating verbs are also common features within this resource that help to ‘describe, classify, define and identify’ aspects of world religions (Droga & Humphrey, 2008, p.31). Examples located within the website include, ‘ Christianity is the  world's biggest religion   ’, ‘  The Torah ** was ** given to the Jews by the Prophet Moses’ and ‘ The religion of Hinduism originated in Northern India’. There are also examples of adverbials within the resource which provide additional information e.g. ‘Buddhism began in north-eastern India'. Jewish history begins with the covenant established between God and Abraham around 1812 BC (over 3,800 years ago) etc. Through the incorporation of grammatical features such as these within the resource, students will be made aware of aspects which compose factual descriptions, facilitating their abilities to create their own descriptive texts.

Overall the resource will serve as purposeful in recognising both visual and written forms of literacy that work in conjunction with descriptive text types. These types of literacies can easily be manipulated to develop talking and listening skills of students, where descriptions are presented in a verbal manner. The incorporation of such educational experiences in the classroom will support students in creating relevant multimodal texts, exploring a wide range of aspects related to World Religions.