Teaching and Learning - 5/6

Welcome everybody to first term of 2018. As always first term is very much about setting up expectations and bedding down class routines. We have been busy getting our class attitude right and will be concentrating upon a positive attitude and expectation to maintain the class culture. It also linked in with our You Can Do It key of Organisation. Students will be using their diaries to initially summarise their school reading and eventually they will be going home as a routine to enable to students to track their homework expectation. In this regard, a good solid regime of thirty minutes of reading and checking over their spelling words for the week is a great way for students to keep on top of their work.

We have been involved in Safer Internet Day and have, once again, gone over the ways of staying safe and respectful online. The children will be taking part in a virtual classroom run by the Office of Esafety.

In our inquiry topic students will be tackling two complimentary mini units of work. Firstly the students will be looking at values. Students will consider ethical dilemmas as they learn about the value of honesty, respect and loyalty. They will consider the influence that the media and others have on them. They will also consider where their ethics have come from and how they use them in everyday situations. The concurrent area for investigation will be everyday economics. The students will be involved in a classroom economy, looking at the problem of scarcity and how this plays out in a model economy. They will be making economic decisions and looking at some the economic decisions that are made by our country. Students will become familiar with terms like opportunity, entrepreneur, cost, saving, interest, export and imports.

In the area of English, we will be completing series of lessons that focus on various comprehension skills during independent reading sessions, such as the important role of predicting and questioning when reading. We will be reading everyday in class for an extended period of time to develop our stamina in this area. In Spelling students will be given thematic and related word lists to extend their vocabulary and understandings of both phonemic and conventional structures in spelling. In Writing, we look forward to implementing processes that support and improve all students writing achievements, as facilitated by our Writing Consultant, Ann Angelopoulos. We have already begun working on creating complex sentences that use a full array of devices to create entertaining and descriptive written work.

Maths will involve a range of games to practice and build number fluency, as well as real world challenges and explicit teaching of mathematical strategies to suit individual needs and strengths. Some specific areas to be investigated and developed are in number patterns, place value, multiplication, division and decimals.