Grade 5 News
Upcoming Dates:
Friday 23rd May - Rowville District Winter Round Robin Day 1
Friday 30th May - Rowville District Winter Round Robin Day 2
Monday 9th June - Monarch’s Birthday Public Holiday (no school)
Monday 16th June - 5MA visit to Waterford Valley Retirement Village
Wednesday 18th June - Senior School Hooptime (selected students)
Looking Ahead to the Year:
Production dates: Tuesday 2nd September and Wednesday 3rd September
Monday, September 8 - Wednesday, September 10: Grade 5 Camp - Anglesea
Learning in Action
Literacy
In our Literature lessons, we continued to meet the remaining characters in our book, 'Waves', who migrated to Australia:
Nianzu - a young boy travelling with his grandfather to Australia to start a new business, continuing the family tradition of fine craftsmanship.
Karim - sent by his uncle to buy camels, which were then sailed out to Australia, beginning the historic role of camels and their cameleers in building the inland infrastructure in northern Australia.
Harry - a young man who looked forward to the opportunity that Australia in the 1940s would present.
Olga - an orphaned Jewish survivor, comforting the younger children as they travel from Germany to Australia.
Marina - along with her mother they are travelling from Italy to reunite with male family members who are working in the cane fields in Queensland.
Cornelia - While her sister looks forward to swimming at Australian beaches and seeing kangaroos, Cornelia is sad to be leaving her home behind and setting sail for the otherside of the world.
Hau - Escaping Vietnam hoping for a better life in Australia, their trip is fraught with tragedy, thanks to pirates, but also hope.
Abdul - this young boy cannot believe the stories that his father tells him of roads that have special places for children to cross, where the drivers actually stop to let children cross safely. This is a world away from his war torn country.
We have been using our knowledge of adjectives, conjunctions and tier 2 vocabulary to complete sentences. Students have been making text to world connections in the more recently read stories, in some cases sharing stories of people they know who have come from Vietnam, China and Afghanistan. If your child would like to continue reading about people coming across the waves, the real life account of an Australian who fled Vietnam with his family, Anh Do’s ‘The Happiest Refugee’, or its picture story book version, ‘The Little Refugee’, is perfect.
Students have continued to work on drafting and publishing their narratives. The inclusion of tier 2 vocabulary, learned during our sentence level writing vocabulary lessons, along with emotive language, has ensured the teachers have been captive readers. There were many occasions where we were hand on heart reading about the plight of some of the characters and their experiences. Two of our Year 5 students shared their narratives at assembly.
Recent Word Work has had us learning about the morpheme strue/struct which means to build, as in structure, and prefixes and suffixes that change the meaning or add meaning to this, including infrastructure, destruct and obstruct.
Preview for Learning:
We will finalise reading Waves, writing our narratives and students will be introduced to a unit on poetry.
Maths
In our recent lessons, students have continued to practise partitioning numbers using the split strategy to solve problems. Eg: 67 x 7 = 60 x 7 + 7 x 7. Through maths games, students have been applying their multiplication knowledge to solve problems.
We looked at a table of data based on Victorian bushfires over decades, which included loss of houses, deaths and duration of the fires. Students firstly plotted data on a dot plot graph, followed by a column graph. They then interpreted the information, writing statements to explain what the graph showed them.
Preview for Learning:
We will be learning about division with a focus on making connections to multiplication.
Maths Opportunity
https://ms.unimelb.edu.au/engage/outreach/micro-mathematicians
Grade 5 Teachers
Karin Halstead, Peta Alexander, Rachel Manning, Craig McKenzie
Updates from around the school
Green Team News:
Under the guidance of Mrs Stokol and Mrs Alexander, the Green Team met for the first time this week. What a meeting it was! All up across years 3-5 we have close to 50 very excited and passionate students wanting to do their part. Whether it’s helping to keep the school free of rubbish, looking after and developing the plants gardens, educating the school community about sustainability, there was a buzz in the air as students shared their ideas and signed up for roles. A new initiative we’ve introduced this term is the collection of 10c containers. The special lunch day during last term raised $21. We look forward to saving these containers on a daily basis from going to landfill and turning them into cash. Money raised will be invested back into Green Team initiatives.
Involvement in the Green Team is all inclusive. It’s not too late for your child to get involved should they wish.