From the 5/6 Classrooms

Welcome to all our grade 5 and 6 families this year!

We have had a wonderful start  

We started our year with our school’s start-up program.  This enables our students the best chance to make a smooth transition from one year to the next, and settle well into their new classes, rooms and routines.

As part of our start-up program we reacquaint ourselves with our classroom rights and responsibilities. These are: 

• We all have the right to feel safe.
• We all have the right to learn. 
• We all have the right to be treated with respect. 

As grades, we discussed our collective, and personal, responsibilities in ensuring that these rights are achieved. 

Importantly, each grade worked together (with their teachers) to determine the rules and expectations for their rooms; including establishing what a good learning environment looks, feels and sounds like.  We were able to talk about what an effective learner at BPPS might look like.  We brainstormed together, and then students created their own templates to represent their views. 

During our first week, we also re-established our understanding of the Writing Traits . The traits are what we use to help our students understand the main components and characteristics of high-quality writing. They are: 

1. Voice,
2. Ideas, 
3. Conventions, 
4. Organization, 
5. Word Choice, and 
6. Sentence Fluency.
   ...the +1 is Presentation! 

We read the book ‘Jetty Jumping’ and we were able to analyse the story which assisted us with learning about the writing traits.

Further to this, we investigated the important differences between a Welcome to Country and an Acknowledgment of Country; then created our own Acknowledgment of Country for our own classrooms. 

Students have been reintroduced to the Learning Assets and the role they play in our rooms and ourselves. 

Students have been challenged to think about what it means to be a collaborator, communicator, self-manager, thinker, and researcher, and apply those understandings to a group inquiry on paper planes. 

During our math sessions we have been able to collect data about ourselves and the members of our grades as a way to get to know one another. We were then able to create graphs with the collected data. Grade six students were able to find the mean, median, mode and range from our data sets.

It has been a phenomenal start to the year, and we look forward to many exciting events, learning opportunities, and more in 2024!