Year 5

Year 5 November Newsletter

Camp

Three days on Phillip Island was amazing! Some of the highlights of our camp were the Giant Swing, where so many of us went to the top, Twin Flying Fox and Rafting. There were times when we were worried the weather wasn’t going to hold out for us, and yet we managed to get through, even with a storm hitting the island in the middle of the night. The food was delicious and everyone had such a great time, though we were all exhausted on the ride home. We crammed in over 7 activities throughout the trip, as well as some fun events with our friends, including a night walk and disco.  

Literacy 

As the weeks have progressed this term, we have continued learning about history through our Knowledge Unit. We have delved deeply into how the earliest settlers in Australia developed the colonies that ultimately became famous cities and towns. We have learnt how the settlers first arrived in Botany Bay and travelled through to Van Diemen's Land, Western Australia and Port Phillip. This unit has also begun to further enhance and link to the learning our students made last year with the Gold Rush and their camp to Sovereign Hill. We have also begun to look into the deeper, and more painful history of Australia, with interesting discussions about the positives and negatives of our past and the famous individuals that were involved. 

We have also continued our learning around Information Reports, and have really broken apart the genre and discussed the core elements needed to write them. This has led us to writing one together as a class before we work on our own detailed Information Reports, ensuring we write factually, use technical and descriptive language and have the many features needed such as headings and subheadings. 

The Year 5 team has focused on using Daily Review to enhance our previously learnt concepts, including identifying misspelt words in complex vocabulary, identifying past and present tense and how even one word can alter the meaning of a sentence.  

Numeracy

Numeracy these past few weeks have revolved around solidifying our understanding of fractions, which included placing simple and complicated fractions on number lines. After we worked on this skill, we began to demonstrate how fractions, decimals and percentage are all linked. This allowed us to learn new concepts such as converting different fractions into decimals, which then allowed us to turn those decimals into percent. We were even able to do this in the reverse as well. 

Our other numeracy topics focused around understanding the Mean, Median and Mode. This was a brand new topic for most of our students and they really engaged with it. We learnt that the Mean is another way of saying the average, while the Median is the middle of a data set and the Mode is the most common denominator of data. We are continuing to refine these skills before taking another look at time, including elapsed time and timezones. 

Auslan

On Tuesday 3rd December we are very excited to be having Auslan Education Services, our Auslan program provider visit our school.  Each class will have the an opportunity to meet and interact with a Deaf person. The team attending on the day will be a Team Leader, a Deaf team member, and an Interpreter. The Deaf team member will begin by presenting to the children about their life as a Deaf person, followed by signing with the students, and some question time. This will be a valuable incursion as this may be students’ first interaction with a Deaf person and gives them their first look at Deaf culture. Each year level will have a 30-minute session on the day.