Yr5 Weekly Update – 03/03/17
Central Idea: Matter exists in different forms which can be changed and used for different purposes
UOI
How does knowing about the changes of matter help us in our everyday life? This is the question we have been inquiring into this week. To help us discover the answer to this question we participated in a number of different learning engagements. We reviewed the experiments completed so far to identify how they are connected to everyday life. Using photographed examples from the Science Museum, we tried to infer the science behind each from the information given. What we enjoyed most though was the ‘walkabout’ we did to identify everyday objects within school that are connected to changes of states. We enjoyed using our observational skills and found lots of great examples!
The summative assessment for this unit requires students to demonstrate their understanding of the central idea by either altering or designing an experiment that shows how matter changes. We have begun to discuss and plan these experiments in preparation for next week. Please talk to your child to see what materials/ingredients they may need to bring into school to conduct their experiment. However, we do have basic ingredients available to students, including flour, oil, salt, sugar, baking powder, food colouring and milk.
Literacy
This week we have moved on from creating oral explanations to planning and developing written explanations of the science behind everyday objects referring to changes of state. To further enhance our explanations, we explored how to create diagrams, flowcharts and even infographics. We’ve continued to use our checklists to self and peer-edit our work. During our guided reading sessions, we’ve used non-fiction texts linked to our UOI to further practice making inferences about the data we have read. Here is a link to a riddle inference game you can play with your child to help them practice this skill at home:
http://www.philtulga.com/Riddles.html
Maths
What are the chances that it will snow tomorrow? How likely is it that you will come to school tomorrow? These are the types of questions we pondered and discussed this week in Maths as we began looking at the topic of probability. We inquired into how we can create scales to show the probability of events and worked through how we might label a scale using appropriate vocabulary (eg. certain, impossible, likely, equal chance, etc). In addition, we figured out that we can also use fractions, decimals and percentages to indicate the likelihood of an event occurring. Games can be a powerful learning tool so we also spent some time playing some very entertaining probability games. Why not ask your child to teach the family how to play one of these games called Greedy Pig? You can check out this link for specific instructions: https://nzmaths.co.nz/resource/greedy-pig-0
Homelearning:
20 minutes of daily reading
Continue to use MyMaths to practise fractions and measure.
Showing density by layering sugared water.
