20 Apr 2018

Yr5 Curriculum Update – 20/04/18

Working together to achieve success for every child

 

 

Our  Transdisciplinary Unit of Inquiry: How we express ourselves: “Media can influence and audience’s thinking and behaviour”

 

Dear Parents

It seems a long time since we last updated you on our learning in school – hopefully this letter will help to get you up to speed on the things we have been inquiring into!

Our Unit of Inquiry on Advertising is well under way. Way back, before the Easter break, we were lucky to have Greg Sutcliffe, a real life advertising copywriter, come and talk to us about what he does to make his advertisements successful. He has been involved in some very high profile campaigns for companies, including Hong Kong’s very own HSBC, so he knows more than a little bit about this!

Students have been both analysing adverts using the criteria we developed with Greg and in our classes, and creating their own adverts for a range of purposes. They have learned about stopping power, unique selling propositions and the different strategies that are employed to establish both of these in the audiences thinking.

In Maths, we have been doing some shorter inquiries over the last couple of weeks. Last week we looked at the ways we can represent the likelihood of a particular outcome, eg the roll of a die, using fractions and probability scales. The language of chance is very important to understanding this aspect of maths and students spent some time exploring and applying this vocabulary.

This week we have started looking at the properties of 2D and 3D shapes. Again, vocabulary is essential to conceptual understanding and so we have begun with making connections to real life descriptions of different shapes and how they are used mathematically.

We have been focusing on our VIEWING AND PRESENTING skills in our language learning during this unit. Analysing and creating multimodal texts has been a really engaging and purposeful way to express our creativity through the different semiotic codes.

Students have edited and redrafted their narrative story about a migration context. They have been learning specific skills and techniques to over the last few weeks to improve their writing in the different 6 Traits of Writing and these are evident in their final pieces.

The traits of writing are:

  • Ideas—the main message.
  • Organization—the internal structure of the piece.
  • Voice—the personal tone and flavor of the author’s message.
  • Word Choice—the vocabulary a writer chooses to convey meaning.
  • Sentence Fluency—the rhythm and flow of the language.
  • Conventions—the mechanical correctness.

 

Upcoming dates for your diary:

Long weekend for May 1 holiday

Buddha’s Birthday May 22