Years 5 & 6

Literacy

Winding up our Literacy learning for Term 4, we have been working our way through the novel "War Horse" by Michael Morpurgo. It has been impressive to watch the way the children have enaged with the book, questioning some of the themes and learning new vocabulary. We had a short and in depth discussion about the history of World War 1, with students asking why it started, and "Why didn't they all just stop and walk away?" As their teacher, I feel privileged to lead them in these discussions. Their maturity is astounding. We talked about how, these days, our society tends to have more upstanders who speak out agianst injustice. We also talked about the link between power and bullying, and how just one person, if allowed, can accumulate enough power that they can negatively impact the whole world.

I am proud to say our students are upstanders who critically analyse these topics and speak up and out for justice.

Numeracy

This week we jumped into the learning pit in Numeracy, focusing upon multiplication and measuring area and perimeter.

The challenge was  "If the area is 15cm2, what is the perimeter?" To start with, everyone made rectangles. When they thought they were done, we discussed the challenge - no where does it say the shape has to be a square or a rectangle. Then we came up with lots of creative shapes that had an area of 15cm2. To date, the largest perimeter we have made is 37cm. The challenge has changed now to who can make the biggest perimeter for that area. Nothing like a bit of healthy competition!

We also completed work on the associative property of multiplication. I am not telling you what that means - ask one of the students. 

Let's just say they took on the challenge of completing some problems that required more than one way to solve.