5/6 News
The Grade 5/6 students are working really hard across all subject areas and really putting their best effort into all aspects of school life. Unfortunately, we have had some students who have had to isolate over the last fortnight. We encourage students, if they are feeling healthy and well enough to log onto google classroom and complete what they can, not all lessons can be transferable but we are doing our very best to make them so. We also direct you to the school website that has a number of resources the students can go on with. We look forward to another exciting fortnight in the senior school.
Mathematics
We have been working with our students in their Maths 'catch' groups each day. On Friday we have a devoted lesson to problem solving, whereby we focus on a range of strategies to support these skills. For the remainder of the week, students are split across 5 groups which provides for smaller classes. This allows us, as teachers, to offer direct support and explicit teaching, based on need. The students are doing a fantastic job moving between classes and taking what they need, which is a great skill to work on for our students in the senior school. In addition, we have launched ‘Rocket Maths’ every Friday whereby students have 5 minutes to complete as many multiplication sums as they can, with the intention of moving up a level! Here is some vocabulary the students have been using in their groups.
addition:
- add
- altogether
- both
- combined
- how many
- increase
- join
- plus
- sum
- together
- total
- and
Subtraction:
- deduct
- detract
- decrease by
- difference
- how many more?
- how many left?
- left over
- less than
- minus
- reduce
- remains
- remove
- subtract
- take away
Multiplication:
- as much
- by
- equal groups
- groups of
- lots of
- multiply
- multiplied by
- per
- product of
- times
Division:
- average
- divide
- each
- equal parts
- evenly
- every
- out of
- quotient
- ratio
- shared equally
- split
English
This week in writing we have continued our work on persuasive texts, with our focus being to sharpen our students' structure. We will continue to break down what is included in an introduction, as well as what persuasive techniques can be used to create a convincing piece of writing. We look forward to continuing this writing unit and developing their writing skills and stamina. Each week we have a new comprehension strategy that we explicitly teach. This week we have focused on the ability to ask questions to support students' understanding of different texts.
We discussed with our students:
1. How does asking questions help us to become better readers?
2. What keywords do questions usually start with?
3. At what stages of the reading process can you ask questions?
Respectful Relationships
We have just finished looking at our emotional literacy which will be the building blocks for the rest of the year and how we bounce back from difficult situations and how we celebrate our achievements. We are now moving on to personal strengths
Activities will assist students to:
• Describe the range and influence of personal
qualities and strengths
• Monitor their progress in consolidating
their strengths
• Assess the value of working independently.
We started by watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3nT2KDAGOc and identifying strengths in one of our heroes (lots of the students picked their parents) and then ourselves. Students will continue to look at celebrating their achievements and strengths and working on ones they have identified that they can improve.
Religion
This last fortnight in RE we have continued our work on community with a focus on our catholic community and different religious communities around the world. The students have done a wonderful job discussing the importance of being an active member of communities and what that looks like. We have also been exploring Lent and that looks like as we get older in our catholic communities. The students have just started doing their readings and scripts for our 'Stations of the Cross' which we hope you will all be able to enjoy as we welcome our Community back onsite.
Class Sport
We have had an introduction into Netball and Football which the students will select to do next term to compete against other schools. The students do not need any experience of playing either sport but will need a mouth guard and football boots preferably, if they choose to play. This week we will be moving on to playing traditional aboriginal games that the students have been learning about during our 'Closing the Gap' inquiry unit and that they researched last week for homework.
School Leaders
In the last couple weeks the school and vice captains have been running our first assembly’s and presenting class awards for all the students. The sport and school captains have been working on a proposal to get a Gaga pit in the school yard. The R.E captains and some other students were helping make pancakes for Shrove Tuesday and supporting Mr Blake in setting up the Ash Wednesday Mass. The environmental captains have been going outside at the last block to help with the bins and promoting the students to bring less rubbish. The sport captains have been helping setup the 5/6 class sport. In the 5/6 area we have started to prepare for the Stations of the Cross presentation in our reading groups. We have also been doing Maths groups where you are assigned a Maths operation that you need to work on. We have also been doing reading rotations where you do one activity per day normally the activity’s are kids news, flip grid, reading train and literacy planet where you do different assigned grammar activities.
Hamish Meredith
School Captain
We look forward to working closely with all students, parents the whole school community this year.
Jayne McKay, Alice Healey, Simon Brown, Dara Blake, Trent Thiessens, Lisa Biffin