Year Five/ Six
Communicating with the Year Five/Six Team
We look forward to partnering with you in 2020, and welcome your input:
Llewela Humphries (Class 56A) humphries.llewela.j@edumail.vic.gov.au
Gary Monopoli (Class 56B) monopoli.gary.p@edumail.vic.gov.au
Hayley Oliver (Class 56C) oliver.hayley.h@edumail.vic.gov.au
Jessica Cameron (Class 56C) Cameron.Jessica.C@edumail.vic.gov.au
Literacy in our YEar Five/ Six Classrooms
During the first four weeks of school, our students have been working super hard in all the areas of English. We have developed detailed anchor charts to assist our students with their learning, and our displays are focused upon reflecting our students learnt skills.
During Term One we have been learning the process of the "Reader's Workshop". Each week the students have been focusing on a different "Thinking Track" and allowing the students to link their thoughts, feelings and ideas to their own independent texts. We have so far explored Predicting, Questioning, and Reacting to our chosen novels.
We have developed a shared library in our Gallery area which the students organised into 10 different genres. We each have a class display of the Reading Genre Wheel where students can track what they are reading through using a drawn avatar. In support of our "Ready-to-Learn Plans" each student has a personal book box which allows them to track the genres they have read, and to hold all reading materials. Students have been building their independent reading stamina, allowing for one-one conferences to be conducted with the teacher... yes that's right, we even read aloud to our teachers in Year Five-Six.
During our Writing sessions, we have introduced our students to the VOICES acronym – V=Voice, O=Organisation, I=Ideas, C=Conventions, E=Excellent word choices, S=Sentence fluency.
During the first few weeks, our students have learnt how to use "figurative language" within their personal writing. We focused on "personifying" an object; which means giving character traits to an inanimate object. Students self-selected an object and wrote short narratives “A day in the life of…” These are displayed in our rooms, and have been a fun and engaging way to build an enjoyment of writing across our senior classes. Building upon our passion for writing, we are now examining what makes an effective narrative; with an explicit focus upon Ideas, Organisation and Conventions. We have investigated different audiences that we are writing for, how we use the language to entertain our audiences, and finally how we can begin our writing to captivate and engage all readers.
In Speaking and Listening, our students have been able to view BTN (Behind the News) which focuses on current news topics linked to Australia and also world current affairs. This is an engaging session as all of the segments are focused purely towards students. It is important that we provide our students with an "age-appropriate" opportunity to access current affairs and the world around them. We also introduced a program called Squizkids which is a News podcast focused purely towards primary students. Both of these programs allow our students to view and / or listen to news and current affairs and make connections to them. Students take notes and ask questions to what they have heard. These programs also explicitly linked to our Inquiry learning.
We look forward to meeting with you personally next Monday and Tuesday evening to discuss the progress, and future learning goals for your child.
