Year 5/6 

Time is flying this term and it’s hard to believe we are already well into the second half of Term One! We have been very busy settling into the routines of our classrooms and are now quickly transitioning from one activity to another, with students excitedly ‘banking time’ for a whole class reward. 

In Reading, we have been very keen to find out what happens to Joey in his adventures during World War I and have been using turn and talk, as well as responding in writing to questions and prompts to demonstrate our understanding. Reader’s Theatre groups have been performing their scripts in front of an audience and it has been wonderful to see students building on their fluency by paying attention to their accuracy, prosody and reading rate. 

In Writing we have been working on planning and drafting our narratives, using the prompt ‘Journey into the Unknown’, using inspiration from War Horse to write about an animal’s journey. Students have been working hard on expanding sentences to make them more interesting and engaging. 

In Maths our work on fractions has continued and it has been great to see confidence and understanding building among our students when completing multi-step problems involving converting mixed numbers to improper fractions and vice versa, as well as simplifying fractions. We had some fun outside and were able to link a basketball shootout and bean bag toss game to fractions and percentages, breaking up the usual classroom routines. Next week we will move on to addition then 3D objects. Our times tables remain a large focus and students are reminded to work on these at home as well as during our daily number fluency, as they are needed in most areas of maths, especially with a large focus being on fractions, factors and multiples. 

We were lucky to have Briana from Auslan in the West visit to teach us some more Auslan, we learnt how to sign school subjects as well as questions including who, what, where when and why. It was great to see so many students retaining lots of knowledge. We have been incorporating our new learnings into our morning circle and Auslan sessions. 

Next week our Year 6 Team as well as Student Council representatives will head into the city for the Dream and Lead conference to learn about leadership, problem solving skills and much more! We look forward to sharing with everyone what we get up to on our big day out in the next newsletter. 

Next week our Year 5 students will begin NAPLAN testing. We have been conducting some practice tests to familiarise students with test conditions and investigating how to solve multiple choice questions. We are trying to make this a really low stress experience; however we understand that some students will feel pressure. We will support all students to ensure they have the best chance to succeed both academically and emotionally. 

Here are some photos of what we have been up to over the last three weeks.