Year 5/6 News

Welcome

Congratulations to all the 5/6 families for making it through a full term of Online Learning! It has obviously been an unusual term, under conditions that have been far from ideal. However, there has still been terrific growth shown by the students across Reading, Writing and Maths. While we will be using the latter stages of the final week to assess the students across different areas of Reading and Maths, it is also designed to be an enjoyable end to the term with the 5/6 Virtual Camp kicking off yesterday. We have had lots of fun creating the activities and putting them together, so we hope the students have taken the time to enjoy a range of different experiences and make the most of the opportunity. It has required some "buy in" from the students as there has been a need to use a little bit of imagination given our current constraints. A big thank you to Mr Downing, whose brainchild this was, as he has put in a power of work to bring the two days together.

Finally a big thank you to all the 5/6 families for your ongoing support through this time and in particular this term. Please try and enjoy the holidays and reward yourselves for a massive effort. Go crazy and go to as many playgrounds as you can over the next two weeks, within a five kilometre radius of course!

Reading

Over the last few weeks the students have been practising the skill of Reorganisation, which is reconstructing two or more pieces of information contained in the text. The variation of difficulty in the skill can range from the clues being contained within the same sentence to them being separated by several paragraphs. The students were offered a number of different tasks where they would read a short text and then answer questions based around combining different parts within what they had read.

Writing

Over the past couple of weeks, after finishing their wonderful Biographies, the students have been working on a number of pieces of writing. Each student wrote a Discussion. They had to think of an issue and present both sides of the argument, this isn't an easy skill! Once they had finished their first draft, the students received editing feedback and they applied the changes to their second draft. We have noticed an improvement in the quality of work since we have been doing a second draft.

We wrote to communicate, by writing letters to some very special members of St. Raphael's community, stay tuned, maybe you will be receiving a letter from a Year 5 or Year 6 student!

Last week some students did 'Free Choice Writing'. We listed all the text types we have covered this year and looked back through our 'Writer's Notebook' for a seed to revisit. The students then chose how they planned, drafted, edited and presented their writing, here are some examples, enjoy!

Maya - A Series of Unfortunate Events review.pdf

Milla - Lost.pdf

Maths

In the final weeks of Term 3, the Year 5/6 students studied Shape. Students participated in a range of clinics from describing two dimensional shapes that result from combining and splitting common shapes to connecting three dimensional objects with their nets and constructing simple prisms and pyramids. Some students delved into the Year 7 curriculum to draw different views of prisms and solids and investigated uniform and non uniform cross sections. The first maths unit in Term 4 will be Patterns and Algebra.

Maths Olympiad

On 17th September, the 2020 Maths Olympiad team, will compete in their final competition for the year. Good Luck! The results for both the Maths Games and Olympiad Contest will be announced early in Term Four.

PPP

As we come to the end of the term the students have been completing some amazing projects during PPP time on a Wednesday and on many occasions undertaken a task in an area they previously didn't have an interest in. There's been knitting, sewing, research projects, designing as well as some fantastic acts of generosity and community spirit.