Year 5 & 6

Year 5/6 November Newsletter

Dear 5/6 Families, 

A new month is here! Can you believe it is already November? With only two months left of the year, we have so many exciting things to look forward to. 

Important dates to remember:

• Melbourne Cup (Public Holiday) - 7th of November 
• Colour Run - 10th of November 
• Curriculum Day - 20th of November 
• End of Year Performance - 8th of December 
• Graduation evening - 14th of December 

Literacy 

In Reading, our 5/6 students have been focusing on their fluency. Everyday students read aloud to their partner for 3 minutes, focusing on their rate, expression, accuracy and punctuation. Our students have also been looking at how substituting words can make a sentence sound more cohesive. 

In Writing, we have been finishing our memoir writing and are now moving onto our multi-genre unit. In this unit, students will choose a topic of their choice and write different text types about that topic. The purpose of this unit is to give students a chance to revise the text types learnt over the year and to give students a choice in what they write about. 

In Health, students have been looking at the endocrine system and what it does to the body. We have looked at the hypothalamus, the pituitary and adrenal glands and their function in our body. We have also looked at the changes our body goes through as we get older. 

Numeracy 

In Numeracy this term we are just finishing up our unit on decimals. Students explored the connection between decimals, percentages and fractions and then were able to demonstrate this knowledge by converting between the three. We drew upon our knowledge of multiplication to multiply decimals by the power of 10 and even by whole numbers. Now that we have a good understanding of the four operations, we are going to investigate BODMAS and the order of operations when brackets are involved. 

As the year winds down, we are reviewing and consolidating many concepts we have learnt across the year. This includes but is not limited to, constructing data displays, time, problem solving, area, length, mass and volume just to name a few. 

Social and Emotional

In our Social and Emotional Learning lessons we have been looking at the effects of body shaming and how our words can have a heavy impact on someone's self esteem. During these lessons students had group discussions about why people say things about the way other people look and why it has such a negative impact on others. We also discussed ways in which we can be body positive at Gilgai Plains, to ourselves and others.