Yr5 Weekly Update – 01/13/17

Central Idea: Biodiversity relies on maintaining a balance within nature

 

UOI

This week, students have begun their personal inquiries into a cause of biodiversity loss.  Initially, we discussed the importance of developing strong questions to guide their inquiries and took a session to construct and revise wonderings around this unit’s key concepts: ‘causation’, ‘connection’, and ‘responsibility.’  After having a few opportunities to research their topic, students will be asked to describe the issue (what is happening) in order to demonstrate that they understand the various threats/impacts to biodiversity. They will show what they know by writing a detailed explanation about their topic. To support their descriptions, students will also need to complete a diagram to illustrate the interdependence of organisms living within the chosen environment and another diagram to outline key causes and effects.

As this personal inquiry will be considered the summative assessment task for this Unit of Inquiry, we have also spent some time co-constructing success criteria in the form of a rubric, which should help the students to direct and assess their success.  It’s wonderful to see how keen everyone is to do some ‘personally-directed’ finding out!

 

Literacy

All our work in Literacy this week has been connected to the personal inquiries students have been immersed in.  As they have been invited to show their understanding of their topics through writing an explanation text, we have continued with this focus.

While researching, students have been honing their reading skills, particularly the skills of synthesis and summarising.  Being a researcher is definitely hard work!  Students have had to locate specific information relevant to their research, identify and summarise key ideas in order to take effective notes, and have needed to synthesise information from a variety of sources.  What a huge task!

 

Maths

We have spent the greater part of this week finishing off our inquiry into multiplicative thinking.  We also reviewed and practiced a variety of learned strategies for multiplying larger numbers.  Students had some interesting conversations around which of these methods they preferred and believed were the most effective.  Some of the preferred strategies included: the column method (most traditional), partitioning and the grid method.  We have noticed that some children still do not have a strong grasp of their multiplication facts and therefore, we recommend students practice these at home by checking out some of the maths websites listed below.

 

Homelearning

•        Twenty minutes daily reading;
•        Try some of the online maths activities to reinforce learning in multiplication and division using MyMaths, Table Trees, Moon Maths or these online games.