Dear Parents,

We are in the process of introducing our new Unit of

Inquiry under the organizing theme of Who We Are. The
Central Idea is ‘Language is integral to identity and gives
us a sense of belonging’.

We will be inquiring into this through the concepts of form

and causation.

Our lines of inquiry are:

 Embracing who we are

 How language affirms identity
 Language and belonging

Through this Unit we hope that the students will gain some understanding of how every language is
unique, that languages can look and sound different and that language plays a fundamental part in
cultural and personal identity. This Unit will hopefully look into different languages from cultures
around the world and link these differences to other parts that make up personal and cultural identities.
We hope that we can also help the students to inquire into other languages such as body language and
expressive languages and see how important language is to humans and how we use many languages to
function.

We will be looking to parents to help us support this Unit through

facilitating story times in home languages and also hands on
activities in home languages. Opportunities for such involvement
will be posted onto the class blogs. The purposes of facilitating
language story times and activities in home languages are: to
acknowledge all the languages of the Early Years center and learn
from one another; to foster a sense of valuing all the home
languages and not just English; and to help build vocabulary in home
languages which in turn supports English language learning for those
students learning the curriculum through a language other than their
first language.

We also plan to have an interactive language wall to help children to explore simple words of their peers
languages and we may call on parents to help provide us with short recordings of words in your home
languages.

This new Unit will develop while the first unit of the year continues and we believe the two units will
work together well. The care of our EY pets has become a big part of our year long unit under the
transdiciplinary theme of ‘How we organize ourselves’ and the responsibilities associated with these
pets will provide the basis of exploration into the importance of language and the difference between
languages, along with other class routines.