The Australian cotton story

Educational value

• This is a valuable resource for the design and technologies curriculum for mid to upper primary students. It addresses the curriculum's food and fibre context and is particularly useful for content descriptions that refer to investigating how fibre is produced in modern societies (years 3 and 4 band) and how and why fibre is produced in managed environments (years 5 and 6 band). While the video focuses mainly on Australian production of cotton on family farms, it also includes some international data on cotton production.
• Produced for Cotton Australia, the video is both an informative and persuasive text and a useful tool for the teaching and learning of content descriptions in the years 4 to 6 English curriculum about how text structures and language features work together to meet the purpose of a text. The footage of children wearing and playing with cotton products, the use of a cotton boll cartoon figure and the explanation of pesticide use are good examples of persuasive techniques in action.
• The sequences showing the growth stages of the cotton plant may also be of use for the content description in the Science Understanding strand of the year 4 science curriculum about all living things having life cycles. The sequences show how cultivation of the cotton plant as a commercial crop depends on the stage in the plant's natural cycle in which it produces cellulose fibre to protect and eventually disperse its heavy seeds.

Year level

3; 4; 5; 6

Topics Text structure Crop cultivation Farming systems Animal reproduction Living things Manufacturing processes Plant reproduction Breeding cycles Cotton Exports Text types Textile industry Similarity (Classification) Text purpose