Grade 5 News 

Upcoming Dates – Term 2

Friday 22nd May: Winter Round Robin Day 1

Friday 29th May: Winter Round Robin Day 2

Important Reminders

• The Grade 5 maths curriculum assumes that all students know their multiplication tables. If your child is still working on this skill, we ask that you support them by finding some time to practise. If you would like suggestions about how to practise, please get in touch with your child's classroom teacher.
• Grade 6 Leaders sell icy poles each Monday and Tuesday at lunchtime for $1

Grade 5 Specialist Timetable

Learning in Action

What an exciting fortnight it has been for the Grade 5s, with running and presenting assembly, special visitors and buddies!

Word Work

This fortnight, students completed exploring the meanings of words derived from the Latin base graph/gram, meaning to read or record. They continued to delve into, modify and create words using the base pend/pense, meaning hang or weigh. This was reinforced through “Jeopardy”-like activities where students were given the meaning and word stem, or kernel, and had to remember the definition and how to spell it.

Preview for learning:

Students will conclude their lessons on pend/pense, meaning hang or weigh, and explore duce/duct, meaning to lead.

Literature

Although we finished War Horse last term, students were treated to two visitors in Week 1. The special visitors were Mrs Halstead’s uncle, Darryl, a war veteran, and Jasper, ridden by the Light Horseman who featured in the Anzac Day AFL clash. These experiences provided students with further opportunities to ask questions and enrich their knowledge and understanding of war.

Students also commenced the new novel, Black Cockatoo by Carl Merrison and Hakea Hustler. The story follows an Indigenous girl in outback Australia. Students explored background information about the Halls Creek communities in the Kimberleys and their connection to Country. They read about the Bungle Bungle Range, Purnululu National Park and Wolfe Creek Crater, and recorded notes from their learning.

We also commenced a character study of Mia, the main protagonist, using the DIAL (Descriptions, Illustrations, Actions, Language) template. From this information, students worked together to make inferences.

Preview for Learning: 

In the upcoming fortnight, students will work towards finishing the novel and learning about totem animals in Indigenous Australian culture. They will use this knowledge to complete their character analysis by writing a paragraph using a topic sentence, supporting details and a concluding sentence.

➗ Maths

We completed our unit on perimeter and area in Week 1, focusing on calculating the area of composite shapes and finding strategies to calculate the length of a side if it was not provided. Students also solved real-world problems such as determining the area of a garden bed and calculating how much soil was needed to fill it.

We began our fractions unit in Week 2, focusing on representing fractions on a fraction wall, comparing and ordering fractions, converting mixed numerals to improper fractions and vice versa, and representing fractions on a number line. This week, students compared and represented fractions on parallel number lines.

Preview for Learning:

In the upcoming fortnight, students will be learning about 3D objects such as spheres, cubes, cylinders and cones. They will further investigate how to draw nets for three-dimensional objects, including prisms and pyramids, before moving on to designing nets for objects. Using this knowledge, students will then be tasked with creating nets to design and construct appropriate packaging for different items.

Knowledge Rich

This term, we are exploring Australia in the 1800s. During Week 1, students learned about the Victorian era, including Queen Victoria, Victorian society and how life was different during this time. In Week 2, we explored the Industrial Revolution and the inventions that emerged during this period and changed the world.

Following this, we have dived into the political, economic and social causes of colonisation, and the impact this had on local Indigenous peoples. Some students have taken the initiative to create short presentations for their class on aspects of their learning. These have included presentations on Queen Victoria, the Hindenburg disaster and black cockatoos.

Preview for Learning: 

In the upcoming fortnight, we will be exploring First Nations peoples and the effects of colonisation on their communities.

Wellbeing

Students have enjoyed a variety of wellbeing activities so far this term. In the first few weeks, they met with their buddies and commenced their first Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships (RRRR) session on Emotional Literacy.

This unit will run over several weeks, with students exploring what emotions look like, recognising positive, negative and mixed emotions, and learning strategies for dealing with intense emotions.

Grade 5 Teachers

Karin Halstead, Peta Alexander, Susanne Stokol with Miss Bortoli, and Irene Chalmers