Grade 5/6 News

Mid term!  

We have now crossed the middle of our first term and everyone is settling into the regular routines of school in the senior building really well. It has been great to have so many of our Grade 5 students be such keen participants who have stepped up to help out whenever we need volunteers for jobs or timetabled responsibilities, such as Chook and Library monitors.

NAPLAN

Next week (Week 7) our Grade 3 and Grade 5 students will complete the NAPLAN Assessments. There are 4 assessments in total - Numeracy, Conventions of Language, Reading and Writing. We will complete these on Wednesday - Friday (15th – 17th March). Our students have spent some time this week ensuring their Netbooks are compatible and they have completed practise tests. 

It is important that our students are ready for the assessments next week, specifically they will need;-

• A set of headphones (these were optional on the booklist, and many students currently don’t have any at school). If you could please send in headphones with your child on Tuesday.
• Netbooks and chargers will need to be left at school for the duration of Week 7. Please make sure chargers are sent to school on Netbook 13th March
• It’s important for students to arrive at school on time, as we will commence at 9am.

Learning in Weeks 7 & 8 

Our Grade 6s will continue with their regular learning program during the NAPLAN sessions in week 7, which will focus on Writing, Reading and Mathematics. During the rest of the week, our regular timetable will continue.

Reading

We are revising our “Accuracy” reading skills and will be focussing on our ability to use known spelling patterns when attempting to read unknown words. Reading texts that challenge us by expanding on the words we already know is a great way to strengthen our reading muscles. 

Writing

We are currently practicing our persuasive skills when writing. Students are trying to use strong emotive words that will elicit a response in our readers. We have been trying to include elements to interest our readers, such as rhetorical questions, interesting word choices and more varied sentence openers. 

Maths

We are working through 'authentic tasks' that cover several sessions in an attempt to better develop our mathematical dispositions and reasoning skills. Last week we used various lego blocks to experiment with fractional measurements. Students represented fractions with different shaped blocks and attempted to add these values together.