Year 5 Term 4 Overviews

Wominjeka Year 5 Families!

A warm welcome back to our final Term of 2024!

Before we dive into a summary of the curriculum for this term, here are some important reminders about the events we have coming up this final term of the year:

• Week 5
  • Monday, 4th of November - Curriculum Day (No students to attend)
  • Tuesday, 5th of November - Melbourne Cup Public Holiday
     
• Week 6
  • Monday, 11th to Wednesday, 13th of November - 5F and 5G Camp @ Camp Sunnystones, Merrimu, Victoria
  • Wednesday, 13th to Friday, 15th of November - 5A, 5B, 5C, 5D, 5E Camp @ Camp Sunnystones, Merrimu, Victoria
     
• Week 11
  • Tuesday, 17th of December - DCC Internal Step-Up Day (Current Year 5s will ‘step up’ to Year 6 for the day with their 2025 classes and teachers)

As always, Term 4 is a very busy one, for a number of reasons! If you have any questions or queries about any of these, please get in touch with your child’s teacher. 

Literacy

Our literacy lessons throughout this term will be split across two major focus areas - explanation texts and poetry.

Explanation texts are as the name suggests - an explanation of how something occurs, happens or is done. In Reading lessons, students will investigate the purpose of these texts, the various ways in which they can be structured and organised and the technical / scientific language used by authors when creating them. In Writing lessons, students will apply their learning to create their own examples of Explanation texts, applying their knowledge and understanding of required structures and vocabulary using a range of chosen and set topics connected to our Geography unit.

Poetry is quite a broad unit! Rather than simply writing one particular type of poem, students will be exposed to a range of different poems, including verse, haiku, ballad, cinquain and acrostic poems, just to name a few. In Reading lessons, students will analyse the purposes of poems, the creative and figurative languages used by poets in order to convey a message and how the structure of various poems can influence their effectiveness. In Writing, students will have an opportunity to select topics to write their own poems about, experimenting with different poetry styles and refining their written pieces as their learning progresses.

These focus areas, along with those outlined in Numeracy, will be combined into a large scale project in the final 5 weeks of term, which will give students an opportunity to apply and integrate their learning in a practical scenario.

Numeracy

Numeracy learning in Term 4 is split across various focus areas!

Here is a brief outline:

• Week 1 - Area and Perimeter of a range of 2D shapes.
• Week 2 - Volume and Capacity of 3D shapes and objects.
• Weeks 3-4 - Data interpretation and representation.
• Weeks 5-7 - Operations, specifically focused on multiplication, division and basic algebra (finding unknown values).
• Weeks 8-9 - Shape transformations and angles.
• Weeks 10-11 - Time.

Alongside this, students will also take part in regular warm-up activities before Maths lessons which focus on Time, in order to build further familiarity in this area.

As mentioned above, students will also be using the mathematical understandings they have developed throughout the year to solve problems as part of an integrated project in the final five weeks of the term.

Geography

Our unit of inquiry for Term 4 is Geography, specifically focused around natural disasters which impact the Asia-Pacific region of planet Earth.

Students will investigate the impacts of droughts, floods, bushfires, cyclones, earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis have upon the people, environments and landscapes would within the region. They will also explore the diverse geographical characteristics across the content of Asia and how humans have adapted to limit the impacts that natural disasters may have.

These understandings will be built upon and reinforced through Literacy lessons, where students will have further opportunities to undertake readings designed to further their knowledge and writing lessons catered to allow students to explain how these disasters occur and express feelings about them creatively through poetry.

Social and Emotional Learning

The Year 5 SEL program for this term is split into two major elements:

• Positive Gender Relations - Aligned directly with the Rights, Responsibilities & Respectful Relationships curriculum, this unit focuses on establishing, maintaining and understanding the importance of positive and respectful relationships between the genders, the impacts of gender-based violence, how to define and understand the idea of sexual assault and where young people can go to receive assistance should they or someone they know come into contact with these events.
   
• Health - The Health unit students will undertake this term expands beyond their understanding of healthy lifestyle habits established in previous years to investigate some of the different services, agencies and individuals that can provide them help with their physical and emotional health, as well as how they can spread awareness and support friends when they are in need.

Also integrated into the SEL curriculum for Term 4 are lessons to assist students in communicating their needs in a healthy and constructive way in times of change, which will be important as their prepare for their Year 6 journey in 2025.

Home Learning

As teachers, a very regular question we receive is ‘How can I support my child’s learning at home?’ With an eye towards preparing students for expectations for Year 6 in 2025, here are some tasks students can complete at home to further their understandings and develop some positive learning habits:

• Home Reading - In Year 5 and 6, we recommend students read at home for 30 minutes each night. This can come in a range of forms - physical books/novels, online literacy resources or any other physical media (newspapers, magazines, etc.). We encourage students to read a range of different text types, as furthering their vocabulary knowledge will have a positive effect on your child’s literacy development as a whole.
  
   
• IXL - All students in Year 5 have access to the online IXL resource. This can be accessed anytime, anywhere, on any device and provides students with a range of ability-appropriate Literacy and Numeracy tasks, connected to the Victorian Curriculum from a Foundation level to Year 12. We regularly use IXL during our classroom learning and encourage students to share this program with their families so it can be used at home - we are planning to continue usage of this app in all classes from Years 3-6 in 2025, so familiarity with this will be of great benefit.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read our curriculum overview for this term! As we approach the end of the year and prepare students for their experiences in year 6 for 2025, there will no doubt be an increase in questions, queries or concerns that you or your child may have. If you require any information, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with your child’s classroom teacher and we will be more than happy to assist! 

Thank you for your continued support,

Christine, Christian, Tom, Rachel, Rachael, Angela, Paul and Sharnie

Year 5 Teaching Team