5/6 CLASSROOM

English

✏️ Writing Focus – Non-Fiction Narratives

This semester, students have been developing their skills as authors through a focused writing unit on non-fiction narratives, inspired by the powerful picture storybook Waves by Donna Rawlins.

Waves explores the journeys of migrants arriving in Australia across different time periods, and it has sparked deep thinking and meaningful discussion in our classroom. Using this text as a springboard, students selected a theme such as courage, belonging, hope, fear, or resilience, and built their own narratives around it.

As part of the writing process, students have:

🔹 Planned and written engaging introductions that hook the reader and clearly express their chosen theme.

🔹 Created powerful character reflections, where they step into the shoes of someone making a life-changing journey.

🔹 Carefully considered the conclusion of their narrative, using planning notes to tie their message together and leave a lasting impact on the reader.

Throughout this unit, students have also built their understanding of sentence structure by learning how to:

✏️ Expand their ideas using interesting sentence openers and rich detail.

✏️ Use conjunctions to extend their ideas and connect information clearly.

✏️ Identify and use independent and dependent clauses to strengthen their writing.

Students have shown focus, creativity, and care in shaping their stories and are now preparing to publish their final good copies. These narratives reflect not just their writing skills, but also their empathy, voice, and personal growth.

We’re incredibly proud of the progress they’ve made—and we can’t wait for you to read their stories at our Learning Expo on Friday, July 4th.

Maths

➗ Maths Focus – Term Highlights

This term in Maths, students have explored a variety of engaging topics that have helped them build both their number skills and mathematical thinking.

🔢 Statistics & Probability We’ve had fun diving into the world of chance and data! Students investigated probability by predicting and recording outcomes from experiments like coin tosses, dice rolls, and other random events. They discussed the likelihood of different outcomes using language such as likely, unlikely, certain, and impossible, and began making connections to fractions, decimals, and percentages to describe probability more precisely.

💰 Decimals Students explored decimal numbers, learning how to read, write, order, and compare them. Through real-world examples like money, measurement, and probability, they deepened their understanding of place value beyond whole numbers.

📍 Location & Transformation (Just Begun!) We’ve just started a new unit on Location and Transformation of Shapes. Students are beginning to explore concepts like translation (slides), reflection (flips), and rotation (turns) on a grid. They are learning to describe the position of objects using coordinates and identify how shapes change or stay the same when moved.

It’s been a hands-on and exciting term in Maths, full of opportunities to experiment, explain, and grow as thinkers. We look forward to sharing more of this learning with you at our Learning Expo!