Year 5/6 News 

Welcome

As we navigate our way through Week 6 the students are well settled and things are almost beginning to feel relatively normal again. There are plenty of skills the students are working on to round out the year particularly through Maths and Literacy such as debating and persuading in Writing, Chance in Maths and Synthesising in Reading. However, despite the students only recently settling back in it is also time to start thinking about next year and this week sees the start of these formal preparations. The Year 5’s will begin a leadership program, while the Year 6’s are undertaking a focus on transitioning into secondary school in readiness for their move into Year 7. Both of these programs will run for four weeks.

While there has been some time given for the students to become accustomed again to school routines it is now at the stage where all the usual expectations need to be closely followed. Correct uniform must be worn at all times, including the school hat. With the weather warming up there will be no deviation from the ‘no hat, no play’ expectation during any outdoor activities. It also imperative that all students come to school each day with a suitable device that is fully charged and ready for use. If this doesn’t occur it becomes quite inhibiting for that particular student to access much of the learning.

As we enter this busy and stressful time of year please don’t hesitate to contact us for any support or if you have any concerns. Please find our contact details at the bottom of the page.

The 5/6 Teachers

Timetable

Learning Intentions

Reading

Our Reading focus over recent weeks has been figurative language. The students have been exposed to a range of figurative language including Similes, Metaphors, Hyperbole, Personification, Alliteration and Onomatopoeia. The students have been learning not only to identify these language devices but also appreciate how powerful they are in describing a character, object or action as well as being a source of entertainment for the reader. The students have also enjoyed the creativity that comes with using different forms of figurative language.

Writing

The students are busily working on putting their episode together for our 5 /6 Debating Podcast, ‘Let’s Get It Straight’. 

Most of the students are using ‘Anchor’ to put all of their recorded sounds and voices together - (Accessed via a free iPad App or through the Website https://anchor.fm/) . It is also excellent to see that some students are also experimenting with other approved iPad Apps, such as GarageBand and iMovie. 

Here are some images of the students working collaboratively and enjoying the new opportunities that Podcasting has presented.

Spelling

It is an expectation that all students complete their Spelling tasks each week. On Monday, we introduce the new spelling focus for the week. This is from our school wide program, ‘SMART Spelling’. In this lesson the students learn about how words and sounds work. This approach helps students to understand words in a different way, so that they are more able to apply and transfer their knowledge of words when writing.

Students are required to do 4 School AND 4 Home Spelling tasks each week. They need to hand in their weekly words spelling tasks and dictation every FRIDAY. 

The weekly words are to be broken up into the appropriate graphs, digraphs, split digraphs, trigraphs and quadgraphs. Students should know what these are, as they have been explained explicitly, from Term 2 2019, during remote learning via video lesson and since we have returned onsite.

The Weekly Words, Weekly Spelling Grid, Homework Tasks, School Tasks, How Words Work, The 4 Coloured Spelling Rules and The Plural Rules, are ALL accessible via Google Classroom. The Weekly Learning Intentions and Success Criteria can also be found there too. 

We encourage you to read through the weekly lesson with your child and have a conversation about what they are learning about words and sounds for that week. 

Here are some examples of how we expect the student’s work to be set out.

Maths

In weeks five and six of Term 4, the Year 5/6 students moved onto their next unit Chance. Students participated in a variety of clinics in which they listed outcomes of chance experiments involving equally likely outcomes and described probabilities using fractions, decimals and percentages. They also conducted chance experiments with both small and large numbers of trials and compared observed frequencies across experiments with expected frequencies.

Contact Details

5/6H

Belinda Hirschauer

bhirschauer@srprestonwest.catholic.edu.au

5/6K

Martine Kelly

mkelly@srprestonwest.catholic.edu.au

5/6V

Matthew Vernal

mvernal@srprestonwest.catholic.edu.au