Level 5 & 6 

TERM 3 DATES

🌱Friday 29th August – Father’s Day Breakfast  

🌱Wednesday September 3rd – Matilda School Production 

🌱Thursday September 4th – Matilda School Production 

🌱Thursday September 4th – District Athletics - Select 5/6 students

🌱Tuesday September 9th – Grade 5 Girls - Calm Youth Session 1

🌱Tuesday September 16th – Grade 5 Girls - Calm Youth Session 2

🌱Friday September 19th – Hooptime - Select 5/6 students

🌱Friday September 19th – Last Day of Term 3 (early dismissal @ 2:30pm

🌱 LITERACY – Reading

With the production fast approaching, our talented students are currently immersed in rehearsals. To accommodate their performance schedule, we’ve temporarily paused our Literature Circle sessions. However, rich reading experiences continue in a slightly different format.

Instead of rotating through the usual roles, students will read set chapters—either as a whole class, in small groups, or independently—and then focus closely on one key Literature Circle role that best fits the text. This approach allows us to unpack each role in greater depth, ensuring students develop a strong understanding of the author’s purpose, character motivations, and key events in the story.

By becoming ‘role experts’ during this phase, students are not only maintaining high-level comprehension and critical thinking but also preparing to recommence full Literature Circle rotations with greater confidence and insight once the production concludes.

In addition, students will continue to read and respond to a variety of texts linked to our CBL theme. They’ll practise summarising, making inferences, and building comprehension skills, while also engaging in weekly spelling and grammar activities. This week, the focus will be on tense, helping students understand and ensure their writing remains clear, consistent, and grammatically correct.

What you can do at home

Although Literature Circles are currently on hold, students are still actively developing their comprehension skills and deepening their understanding of the individual roles. One way to support this at home is to invite your child to read a chapter aloud to you, then have a chat about what happened, why it matters, and how a specific Literature Circle role (like Summariser or Character Captain) might unpack it. These simple discussions help reinforce critical thinking and build reading confidence.

🌱 Writing

As part of Tristan Bancks’ Story School, students are continuing to work through lessons in the “Fly” stage of their writing journey. Over recent weeks, they’ve explored creative strategies such as writing to music, “spying” on their characters to better understand their personalities and motivations, and crafting narratives that bring these characters vividly to life on the page.

This week, students will select one of the stories they began during Story School and apply the new skills they’ve developed to complete, elevate, edit, and publish their piece. This process allows them to refine their writing, experiment with structure and language, and take pride in producing a polished and purposeful final draft.

What you can do at home

Chat with your child about the stories they’re creating as part of Story School. Encourage them to share details about their characters, settings, and the problems and solutions within their narratives. You might ask questions like:

• “What motivates your main character?”
• “Where is your story set, and why did you choose that place?”
• “What challenge does your character face, and how do they overcome it?”

These conversations not only help students clarify and refine their ideas but also build confidence as young writers, strengthen their storytelling skills, and deepen their connection to the creative writing process.

🌱 NUMERACY 

This week in Maths on the Move, students will continue to strengthen their understanding of decimals and how they connect to everyday situations. They will explore the relationship between decimals, whole numbers, fractions, and percentages while extending their place value knowledge to include tenths, hundredths, and thousandths. Students will practise reading, writing, ordering, and representing decimals in a variety of ways, as well as rounding them accurately.

Some students will also work on applying efficient strategies to add, subtract, multiply, and divide decimals, using estimation to check the reasonableness of their answers. To deepen their understanding, they’ll apply these skills to real-world problems involving money, measurement, and data, helping them see how decimals are used beyond the classroom.

What you can do at home

Try to invovle your child when handling money, comparing prices at the shops, or working out discounts and sale percentages. Cooking is another great opportunity — measuring ingredients can spark discussions about tenths, hundredths, and thousandths. Asking questions like “Is 0.7 bigger or smaller than 0.65?” or “How could we round $7.89 to the nearest dollar?” helps your child apply their classroom learning in meaningful, everyday ways.

🌱 CBL 

This term, our Big Idea is Change. Grade 5 and 6 students will explore how our local environment has experienced environmental and geographical changes. 

This week, students will begin an exciting design project focused on supporting our school’s natural environment. They will be creating tags for the native plants around our grounds, which will later be used to label and identify different species within our gardens.

As part of this process, students will explore the importance of native plants in supporting local wildlife, preserving biodiversity, and maintaining healthy ecosystems. They’ll also learn about the role of clear and informative signage in helping our school community recognise and appreciate the incredible variety of plants we have on-site.

This project combines creativity with real-world application, giving students the opportunity to design tags that are not only visually appealing but also educational and purposeful. Once completed, these tags will become a lasting resource for students, families, and visitors to enjoy and learn from.

Essential Question: 

How do we leave a lasting legacy?

Guiding Questions: 

- In what ways has our area changed over time?

- How do rules and regulations help to protect our environment?

- How are the environmental changes in places tracked and managed over time?

- What can we do as a community to ensure the ongoing sustainability of Wonga Park?

Challenge:

Regenerate an area of our school to make a lasting change.   

🌱 HOMEWORK

Students are expected to complete homework on a weekly basis. This consists of

- 100 minutes total of reading a novel/factual text of their choice

- 3 (minimum) Mathletics tasks, which the teachers will assign

- 2 Nessy activities

This homework is to be recorded in the Calendar App on student iPads. Your child's teacher will check this homework on Friday.

BUDDY BAGS - Grade 5 students have been introduced to Buddy Bags, which are gifted to their 2026 Prep Buddies. The first and second tasks have been submitted and now students, over the next two weeks are making their buddies an alphabet book. Please check in with your child to ensure they are on task for bringing their item in by the due date.

MEMORY BOOKS - Grade 6 students have been introduced to the Memory Book they will create in Terms 3 and 4, to reflect on their experiences at Wonga Park Primary School. This information will be communicated to parents via email, and is available for students on Showbie. 

 🌿 REMINDERS

🌱 Please assist your child in ensuring that their iPad comes to school every day, fully charged.