Year 5 News

We hope everyone had a well-rested break and are ready for another busy term! With a nice treat of a 4-day week, in great Year 5 fashion, the students have began the term running with Maths, literacy and a research project.

Literacy

This term we will be diving deep into one of the six traits of writing, Sentence Fluency. Each lesson will explore further into how sentences are formed, structured and created in the English language. The students will be exposed to mentor texts with rich language and structure, to help influence their sentence creations. 

So far, we have discussed sentence length, sentence fluency and beginners, emphasizing on nouns, verbs, pronouns and conjunctions. We look forward to reading their wonderful creations in the coming weeks.

Numeracy

Using their prior knowledge of place value, the Year 5s are experimenting with rounding and estimations of whole and decimal numbers. Every student was challenged to round and estimate a sum of two numbers, before doing the precise addition, with the answer to match.

Research Project

Without a moment to rest, the students jumped straight into a new research project. Within each class, the students were split into groups of 4 or 5, to research a certain region from different countries around the world. 

The regions researched were, Yogyakarta City, Jarrell, Sendai, Bakersfield and Benguet Province. The groups were assigned with researching the demographics, climate, geographical features and infrastructure of their region. Once the teams completed their research, they were then tasked with creating their region from recycled materials brought in from home. 

The purpose of the research task was for the students to become invested in a region and feel a sense of ownership to their builds. 

Unknown by the students, this task was our provocation for our new Unit of Inquiry, How the World Works. Our new central idea is, Changes to the Earth’s surface and natural environment can impact on human lives. So, using their newly built models as our test subjects, we explored the devastating impact that natural disasters have on the natural environment, human society and infrastructure. 

Each region was subjected to a natural event that the real-life counterpart is prone to. Such events include; volcanic eruption, earthquake, landslide, tsunami and tornado. The teachers were very impressed with how the students handled these disasters, with maybe a shed tear or two.

Please enjoy looking through the photos of the creation stage and watching the devastation unfold in the video.

Well done to the Year 5 students for a successful transition back into term 2.