Level 5: Connect

Reading Log 

A reminder that the Senior Learning Centre Reading Log Challenge is in full swing! Student reading logs are monitored each week to track which class is reading the most and showing the greatest consistency. The competition has sparked wonderful conversations about books and reading, and we encourage all students to keep up the fantastic effort.

 Literacy

This week, our Level 5's have published their letters capturing different perspectives of The Arrival of the First Fleet. They participated in the entire writing process from planning, drafting, editing, redrafting and publishing. They have spent time making their published texts look like a historical artefact. Their dedication to the task is reflected in their high quality results. They are displayed across the SLC. If you could like to have a sneak peek, pop in after school.

This week we also started our class novel Yong: The Journey of an Unworthy Son. The novel follows the journey of a 13-year-old boy and father migrating from Guangdong to Australia in hope of finding Gold during The Australian Gold Rush. Students have used evidence from the text to build meaningful predictions and have investigated the difference between literal, inferential and evaluative questions to deepen their understaning of a text.

In preparation of our persuasive writing task in Week 5, students have been researching the life of Ned Kelly. They have been using historical recounts to decide whether Ned Kelly was a hero or a villain. Feel free to have a discussion with your child on what qualities make a hero, and whether Ned Kelly met those qualities.

Our Literacy and Inquiry units will lead perfectly into our end of term camp to Sovereign Hill.

Sovereign Hill Camp

A friendly reminder that our Level 5 Sovereign Hill Camp will be on the last week of this term (Wednesday 24th of June to Friday 26th of June). 

Please refer to the Compass e-mail sent by Michelle Stainforth regarding the collection of personal, medical and dietary information of students attending our camp due Thursday 15th of May.  

We are seeking a few dads or male carers to join us on camp as parent volunteers. As our teaching team is all female, we would greatly appreciate some positive male role models to support supervision, activities and student wellbeing throughout the camp experience. If you are interested and available, please contact the Level 5 team

The camp is an immersive historical experience for students. Sovereign Hill will provide students with an authentic, historical costume to wear during the program. 

They have kindly asked that families provide the following for your child: 

• Shoes: plain black or brown leather-style lace-up shoes or pull-on boots, preferably no zips

• Socks: 

o Girls – long plain white, black or navy (no logos/patterns) 

o Boys – plain white, black, navy or grey (no logos/patterns) 

• Hair: 
  • Girls should have their hair in two plaits (if long enough)
  • Boys with long hair should have a low ponytail.

Numeracy

We have officially launched our new Number Fluency program, and the students have done a fantastic job learning and mastering the routines! 

At the beginning of each Maths session, students now participate in short, engaging fluency activities designed to strengthen confidence, accuracy and flexibility with numbers. These daily routines encourage students to think quickly and strengthen their recall of important number facts. It was been wonderful to see the enthusiasm and focus students are bringing to these sessions.

In Mathematics, we have now moved into our unit on Multiplicative Thinking.  This learning area helps students build a deeper understanding of multiplication and division, and how numbers connect to one another. 

So far, they have been:

• practising multiplication and related division facts
• exploring fact families (eg. 3 x 4= 12, 4 x 3 = 12, 12 ÷ 3 = 4, 12 ÷ 4 = 3)
• finding factors and multiples 
• identifying prime and composite numbers

Students have been using games, hands-on activities and problem-solving tasks to apply their learning in different ways. They are being encouraged to explain their thinking, look for patterns and choose efficient strategies when solving problems. 

We have loved seeing students grow in confidence and develop stronger number knowledge each week. 

Play Leaders

Last Friday, our wonderful Play Leaders showed exceptional leadership in teaching our school community some of the games they learnt last term from Youth Reslience Australia. Our staff were raving about what a wonderful job they did and how engaged the students were in the games. We are SO proud of them and we are looking forward to what they teach us during our next Communities.

Warm regards,

The Level 5 Team - Michelle, Cazz and Katie