Year 5/6
The 5/6 Team have hit the ground running for Term Two getting straight back into the swing of our daily routines and expectations. It was wonderful to hear about everyone’s holiday adventures. We have our Phillip Island camp coming up in a couple of weeks which we are all very much looking forward to as a bit of a mid-term break from the classroom!
In Reading we finished our beloved War Horse and were all relieved that Joey got his happy ending and was reunited with Albert in the end. We complemented the book by watching the movie last week which was a great opportunity to compare and contrast the book and movie, with many differences being identified. We have now begun our new unit, The Age of Exploration and are learning all about the exploration of The Americas and Europe, specifically around the spice trade. We have already begun to expand our vocabulary as we learn about this important time in history and are working on answering comprehension questions as a full sentence and drawing on evidence from the text when responding.
In Writing we have begun planning our persuasive pieces and are learning about persuasive techniques used to hook in the reader and encourage them to agree with our points of view on a topic. We have seen a huge improvement in spelling across the 5/6 classes already this term when learning about silent letters and will be moving on to homophones which tend to stump a lot of us! Our students have been eagerly working on their handwriting, not just during our handwriting sessions but in all writing sessions, with some students being presented with personalised pen licences for their efforts!
In Maths we have continued to build on our fraction's understandings, adding and subtracting fractions with like and unlike denominators, simplifying and converting fractions from improper to mixed numbers. A high importance has been placed again on learning our times tables and solving them in less than 6 seconds, with many students beating this time. Further onto times tables we have learnt about factors, multiples, square and even triangular numbers! It has been wonderful to see students building on their number skills and we will be expanding further to explore fractions, decimals and percentages, finding relationships between these concepts.
During Wellbeing the Year 5’s have been working on collaboratively designing and creating board games based on friendships, kindness and gratitude. It has been wonderful seeing the unique ideas and we can’t wait to play them when they are complete. Some of our Year 5’s have also been working on their problem solving, decision making and communication skills playing various board games with their peers. Year 6’s have been delivering their short presentations on people in their life that display leadership qualities and setting themselves goals for what future leadership roles they would like to take.
