Year 5 Term 3 Overviews

Wominjeka Year 5 families,

How quickly the year passes! Welcome to Term 3 - a term that brings with it a range of events, as well as a lot of new learning. We’re pleased to report that all students have made a successful transition back into their learning and have made a very smooth start to the term.

This term, Grade 5G farewells Stephanie Galanis as she returns home to Canada after two memorable years as part of the DCC family. In her stead, we extend a warm welcome to Mark Crossman to our Year 5 teaching team, who has already begun a transition program with 5G ahead of taking charge in Week 4.

Here’s what students and families can expect from Year 5 this term…

Important Events

• Mad About Science Incursion
  • Grades 5B/5D/5E/5F - Thursday, 21st of August
  • Grades 5A/5C/5G/5H - Friday, 22nd of August
• Celebration of Learning
  • All classes - 2:30pm, Tuesday, 9th of September

Curriculum

In Literacy this semester, students will be investigating the features and purposes of various Nonfiction texts, specifically those which are designed to inform, explain and describe.

While Reading, students will be challenged to use both visual and written text features to explain an author’s purpose and intentions for creating a text, as well as using these to respond to questions designed to deepen their understanding of the concepts they encounter. They will also have opportunities to compare and contrast different aspects of Nonfiction texts, analysing the information and features present in each, giving their opinions regarding the texts and reinforcing these with relevant evidence.

While Writing, students will have the opportunity to create both Information Reports and Procedural Texts. Information Reports allow students to experiment with technical language in order to create a text which informs the author about a topic. When writing Procedural Texts, students will be guided towards creating clear and easy to understand instructions to perform a particular task or experiment in a concise and formal format.

Spelling and grammar remains a strong focus in Year 5, taught through weekly spelling lessons, regular warm up activities focused on appropriate word usage, spelling patterns and punctuation and reflective activities designed to reinforce the key focus areas of each lesson.

Numeracy

Term 3 brings three distinct focus areas to the Mathematics curriculum for Year 5, including:

• Operations and Financial Mathematics (Weeks 1 to 3)
• Fractional Thinking (Weeks 4 to 7) 
• Location (Weeks 8 and 9)

Our Operations unit challenges students to apply their knowledge of the four operations to understand inverse pairs (addition and subtraction / multiplication and division) and use this knowledge to find unknown values in equations. These are presented in both number sentences and worded problems, connected strongly to real world applications. This expands into Financial Mathematics, where students will work to create financial plans involving budgets, experimenting with spreadsheeting technology to create them.

Our Fractional thinking unit focuses on furthering students’ understanding of common fractions and decimal fractions through chance experiments and games of chance. Students will be challenged to add and subtract like and unlike fractions, express fractions as improper fractions and mixed numbers and make connections between fractions and decimals, ordering these using proportional reasoning.

Finally, we conclude with a brief Location unit, where students will be using grid coordinates to read and construct maps and locate features on them, as well as using directional language to describe movements.

Unit of Inquiry

The Year 5 Unit of Inquiry for Term 3 is Science, underpinned by the investigative theme ‘How The World Works’. This unit focuses on various aspects of chemical science, including the states of matter (primarily gases, liquids and solids), how substances can more between the states, the processes involved in this and the various changes that can influence matter (physical, chemical, reversible and irreversible, just to name a few!). 

Students will have many opportunities to get ‘hands on’ during this unit, observing and carrying out various experiments, recording their findings and responding to questions based on them.

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)

Our SEL focus for this term is split into two key areas:

• Sexuality Education Workshops (Weeks 1 to 3)
• Gender and Identity

The Sexuality Education Workshops, delivered in classrooms by educators from Sex Education Australia, provide students with information regarding human development, appropriate names for both male and female body parts, puberty and the changes their bodies may go through.

The Gender and Identity unit, part of the Rights, Responsibilities and Respectful Relationships curriculum created by the Victorian Government, discusses key topics such as gender equality, norms and stereotypes, as well as the differences between sex and gender.

Home Learning

Students are encouraged to engage with 30 minutes of reading each night, which can come in a variety of formats, including fiction and nonfiction books, newspapers and online sources.

As well as this, students have access to the IXL app at all times, which allows them access to a range of Literacy and Numeracy resources and games connected to the learning we are doing at school. Students have completed a diagnostic assessment earlier in the year which provides them with relevant challenges and teachers routinely assign and highlight tasks which challenge students to demonstrate their understanding and reflect upon their learning areas.

We’re looking forward to another fantastic term and continuing to build upon the strong start our Year 5 cohort has made. As always, if you have any questions, queries or concerns, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with your child’s classroom teacher and we’ll be more than happy to help out.

Kind regards,

Christian, Rachel, Christine, Tom, Paul, Zandile, Mark, Dilara and Bernadette

• Year 5 Teaching Team