Welcome Back to Term 3!

We have hit the ground running in Term 3 getting straight back into our learning in Year 5. The students have been done very well adjusting to having Mrs Harrison out of the classroom in Week 1, with Mrs Shomburg stepping in so that Mrs H could help out in the office.

We have begun a range of new topics this term, notably our new Humanities and Social Science topic that we are integrating into our report writing program. We are learning all about colonial times in Australia and what happened when the convicts came to Australia. We are investigating pivotal events/developments that occurred and beginning to create our digital reports on these topics including frontier convicts between Aboriginal Australians and British settlers, the gold rush and many more.

The Year 5 class are focusing on improving our research and referencing skills and are looking forward to learning lots more about the History of our country. You can help your child at home by:

• encouraging them to use 'kid friendly' search engines
• discussing the importance of using key words instead of whole questions to search
• reminding them to read and summarise information - copying without understanding doesn't help anyone

I also encourage all parents to ask their child to log into their digital license account and have a look a the kind of content we are learning about at the moment. We will cover topics across a fortnight or so with students at the moment discussing 'protecting passwords and privacy'. We have already looked at safe use of a range of devices.

You may have noticed that uploaded on google classroom this term we have information about our READING ROTATIONS, MATHS TOPICS and SPELLING PROGRAM. This is a way of using our 1:1 classroom to open up the learning we are doing to parents so you are clear on how we are progressing through our learning in the classroom and see where we are up to in the teaching and learning program. If you have any questions about how to help your child with various topics at home, you can refer to these documents or as always you are welcome to come in and have a chat with Mrs H.

In Week 2 we celebrated OLMC Week, thank you to those families who were able to contribute a donation to our winter woolies clothes drive. It is much appreciated and we will donate these to the Red Cross in Fremantle. We also undertook a rosary prayer session with the OLMC parish during this week and we found it very valuable to be a part of such a cherished tradition within our church.

Recently, the Year 5 students have been busy completing many varied learning opportunities including:

• S.T.E.M project investigation and presentations - students had to work in groups to design an invention that would have helped the convicts with their tasks during colonial times. The stipulations were that students could use any materials, had to be able to justify using research about what machine they were creating and what it could do and needed to be powered by a coded sphero robot! The Year 5 class did an AMAZING job of creating their masterpieces and presenting them to the class. Some of the most valuable learning came from the feedback students gave each other in regards to their projects and how they could be improved in the future as well as the self reflections the students completed to consider HOW they could make adjustments to improve their devices in the future.
• Eucharist and Baptism - We have been investigating the special sacraments of Eucharist and Baptism this term in Religious Education with students comparing our traditions of Eucharist with those of Passover as taken from the book of Exodus. In Baptism we have explored what we are able to do because we have been strengthened by Baptism. Students are currently developing digital images that depict actions we are able to undertake because we have been Baptised and are a part of God's family.
• Adding and subtracting fractions - we have been learning all about how to add and subtract fractions. We began with simple fractions and mixed numerals and then provided extension opportunities for students who were ready to add and subtract using different denominators. Some Year 5 students even went as far as finding the lowest common denominator for their calculations. Across all learning areas we have been focusing on feedback and reflection so we can reach our full potential with Mrs Harrison providing information about the different levels we could achieve through our learning intention and success criteria each lesson and completing self reflection at the end of our unit to see how well we really understand the fractions work we completed.
• Report writing - students have been researching and writing reports on events that contributed to the colonisation of Australia such as The Frontier Conflicts, The Pinjarra Massacre and The Gold Rush. The Year 5's have been looking into these events individually and have also been investigating specific explorers who contributed to our great country in small groups. Each group will present a speech about their explorer to the class next week (Week 9) and show the parents our videos and reflections at Learning Journey.
• Excursion - we travelled to The Round House and The Shipwreck Gallery to explore Fremantle's History and connection to the Swan River Colony settlement. We are going to use our excursion to create artworks of The Round House and look forward to sharing these soon!