Week 1 - 3 in Year 5

We have been loving our start to Year 5 this year! The students have settled in so beautifully to our classroom and are working together to build a safe and friendly school by showing care, courtesy, respect and responsibility as senior members of our school community.

Thus far we have begun our unit on fractured fairytales and retold our versions of Jack and the Beanstalk as well as The Three Little Pigs. Students have been very successful in creating interesting to read tales, and we are working on improving our vocabulary and connectors in writing to make what we write more interesting to read and be fluent to read.

Maths has seen us explore place value up to 6 digit numbers (that's hundreds of thousands!) and we will be moving into various multiplication strategies. You can help us at home by continuing to practice any multiplication tables (or associated division sums) that we are unsure about.

Visual Art has been really fun as we have investigated the difference between warm and cool colours and which colours compliment each other by looking at the colour wheel. We are now moving into our work on lines in artworks and how different lines can evoke various emotions.

In Religion we have discussed the idea that God created everyone equal but gave females and males different gifts, talents and interests and how these relate to us. We have also been discussing how we can show love verbally and non verbally to one another, and are moving into discussing how God shows us love through forgiveness and reviewing our previous work on Penance.

We have been really enjoying our sport in Year 5 and it was awesome to experience a cricket clinic that Mr Rijs organised for us in Week 2. Our instructor was so knowledgable and even though it was unbelievable weather for summer time, we still got to practice all our cricket skills.

Week 4 - 6 in Year 5

Weeks 4 through 6 saw us busily completing swimming lessons as well as putting the final touches on our Humanities and Social Sciences presentations about Natural Disasters which we will be presenting to the class and uploading to the class website in Week 8.

We have moved from learning about place value to six digits and the partial product in Maths to decimal numbers and distinguishing what a decimal number is, how to write it and how to add to the tenths and hundredths. We have been gaining a great understanding of the vocabulary used when talking about decimal numbers and how we can use these in everyday life.

Over in Literacy, we are completing our final assessment pieces for narrative writing by creating our own version of The Princess and the Pea which we will publish as e-book's for parents to enjoy. We will have QR codes so that you can scan and enjoy our work in the next few weeks as we finish drafting, editing and publishing our detailed stories. We have taken a lot of time in Literacy rotations to focus on including Vocabulary, Connectives, Openers and Punctuation (VCOP) in our writing and this is a term you might hear us use at home.

Finally in Genius hour our projects are coming along really well! We all have a chosen question that is our driving force for our passion projects and are busy in the research stage answering questions and gathering information that will make our final projects insightful and interesting when it comes time to present next term.

Our Genius Hour questions

Learning how to 'keep a lid on' with Mrs Rowland in Highway Heroes

Week 7 - 9 in Year 5

WOW! What a term we have had in Year 5. The last few weeks have had us competing in the swimming carnival (congratulations to Isla, Gemma, Jayde, Adam and Levi on their achievements), finalising and presenting projects for Digital and Design Technologies and Humanities and Social Sciences as well as heaps of other interesting things.

In Literacy we have shifted our focus from narrative writing to persuasive writing looking at using complex persuasive devices and language features to clearly present arguments. In Reading we are finishing off our focus novel 'The Ab Diver' and using text features to justify our analysis of the book including details about the characters motivations within the story, how the setting has been constructed and who we perceive to be the intended audience.

In Maths we have moved through looking at decimals and ordering them into tenths and hundredths and are now looking at solving problems involving elapsed time to cement the idea that there are 60 minutes in an hour and this fact assists with our calculations.

Religion has been very interesting these last few weeks as we have been working on our Lent unit of work focusing on comparing the Mass we celebrate at Easter with the special events depicted in the bible including Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday. We are also busily preparing for our Holy Week presentation in Week 10 - Friday 7th April where we will present to the school the Stations of the Cross. Students are asked to bring a white, black or brown t-shirt to change into for our performances.

Below is a video that the lovely Alana created using iMovie of the result of our Big Bad Wolf project for Digital and Design Technologies. Students had to create a house that was 100% recyclable and could withstand the big bad wold blowing it down (Mrs Harrison's hairdryer)