Animal welfare is an authentic context for students to develop their writing skills and understandings of explanation writing purposes and processes. The learning experiences within this unit encourage students to focus on a specific animal well-being topic, choose a particular question about that topic, then research using a variety of resources to explore and answer the question in detail.

Students then create a written explanation of the animal well-being topic. It is hoped that by providing students opportunities to write meaningful explanations, they will be more engaged in the writing process as they will see the tasks as relevant and purposeful.

Writing and reading texts about animals’ needs, care, well-being and sentience, will also help students in developing greater knowledge and understandings of these topics and therefore support them in becoming informed, responsible animal guardians now and in the future.