Year 5 Newsletter
It’s been a quiet couple of weeks in the Year 5 area, with many students away unwell. It has been lovely seeing most students returning this week with smiles on their faces, eager to be back with their friends!
Over the past two weeks, we have begun Literacy Circles in earnest. Many students are devouring their novels and are eager every week to read on further. Some may find reading and completing their comprehension roles and summaries by a weekly deadline a challenge. We encourage all students to take their work home and get it finished early so it takes the stress away from what should be an enjoyable, collective experience.
During our weekly meetings students read out their summaries and share their roles. They will have the opportunity to ask each other questions about the story and argue about their opinions on the events, the characters and the plot. Students will have the chance to complete extension tasks if they successfully finish their weekly requirements.
Over the past weeks, we have been focusing on the morphemes (word parts) ‘ped’ (meaning: foot) and ‘circu/circum’ (meaning: through/across/around). The students practise spelling and breaking various apart, identify spelling rules and discussing each word's meaning in context. Our grammar lessons have explored building our understanding of adverbs and quality adjectives, and how they can be used to up-level our writing. Our weekly Dictation sessions, give students an opportunity to practise using our focus morphemes and grammar in their writing.
Narrative Writing is always one of the student’s favourite genres. It brings out their creativity and enthusiasm. We have been learning how to develop a setting using our senses, describe our stories hero and villain and weave a plot using a clear problem and solution. We have been experimenting with a variety of exciting and interesting ways to hook readers into our story. In the coming weeks, we hope to bring it all together to create our Narrative. We’re all looking forward to it.
Addition and Subtraction have been our focus in Maths for the beginning of this term. From our pre-assessment, the students all had specific goals set. Using Essential Assessment, they have been working their way through achieving these goals and working on areas of subtraction they struggled with in the assessment. In class, we have been focusing on learning the algorithm and working with partners to help each other learn the concepts. Our next focus will be the other two operations: multiplication and division and given all the games and activities we have in store, it should be lots of fun.
The children have enthusiastically raced around the world over the past weeks and it certainly brought out a high level of competitive learning in them. Working with a partner, they were given clues to countries that they would ‘travel’ to and questions they needed to quickly answer before they were given their next clue. We travelled through Asia in the first week, USA in the second and finished in Europe.
We are looking forward to celebrating our school’s 100th Birthday next week. What an amazing milestone for our community!
Best Wishes
The Year 5 Team