Year 5

Year 5 October Newsletter

Literacy 

We have started our final term of year 5 by looking at Australian History. Our Knowledge topic connects heavily with our novel from last term and this has been an amazing building block where we have been able to draw upon our knowledge of Tom Appleby Convict Boy to assist in our learning. During the first week we have looked into the First Fleet and the origins of the early colonies in Sydney, Western Australia and Tasmania. This has broadened our understanding of life in Australia, and England, in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. 

Furthermore, our history topic has become a strong foundation for developing our skills in writing Information Reports. This week we have started working on syntax needed for Information Reports and recognising present and past tense as well as the point of view of writing. This will lead into us working on writing our own, detailed Information Report, which we will aim to link to Australian History, early convict settlements and colonies. 

The Year 5 team has focused on using Daily Review to enhance our previously learnt concepts, including practising phonics and spelling, identifying complex and compound sentences, and understanding adjectives, adverbs and verbs and how they are used in sentences, and how they might be used to change the meaning and structure of the sentence.

Numeracy 

For the first week back this term, we focused on reviewing as many of the concepts across numeracy we have learnt this year - and there were a lot of them. We looked at two-digit multiplication, short division, money, decimals, chance and data and shapes among numerous others. This week we have moved into refreshing our knowledge on fractions, including converting them, but with a main focus on how we can identify the location of a range of fractions across a number line. 

In our other numeracy topics, our students have continued learning about geometry, focusing on the space, movement and location of different objects and images. This week we have looked at reflection and translation and next week we will add rotation. Finally, we have introduced all year 5 students to the mean, median and mode and how we can discover the average, middle and most common factor in a range of data sets. 

Social Emotional Learning (SEL)

Gilgai Plains Primary School has become involved in the School Wide Positive Behaviour Support (SWPBS) program, and we have begun implementing this program through the Gilgai Getter Cards. These cards are offered to students who have exceptional behaviour and show the school values. For the Resilience Project we have been working towards recalling our happy memories and sharing them with our peers. This has been great as hearing about happy memories from others has helped to improve our overall happiness.

Auslan

In Auslan we have learnt about hand structure and the names and signs for the different ways we move our hands when signing. This has improved our understanding of what we are learning, but has also given us an opportunity to focus on our facial movements. As the weeks progress we will look into topics we have learnt this year, by delving deeper and using signs in sentences.