Yr5 Weekly Update – 12/09/16
Central Idea: Biodiversity relies on maintaining a balance within nature
UOI
Being in our tuning in phase of our new inquiries we have been totally immersed in biodiversity in and around the classrooms. We were lucky enough to have our fabulous green fingered environmental expert come in and talk to us all about the action him and his Eagle owl group take around Hong Kong. We learnt all about the importance of planting native trees and the prevention of wildfires, to increase Hong Kong’s biodiversity. We learnt about some of the threats to Hong Kong’s biodiversity including discovering some interesting native animals past and present. Throughout the year each student has had the opportunity to work with Mr Melsom around KJS to share in his passion for gardening. We have consolidated our understanding of how living things are connected through several Visible Thinking Routines which are an excellent way for students to develop their thinking skills and share them in a clearly visible way.
English
The language skills which are most important for this unit of inquiry, when we come to researching concepts in further detail, are determining important ideas and summarising. Therefore these are the reading skills we are focussing on. This includes being able to distinguish ‘important’ detail from ‘interesting’ detail. Why not have a go when reading with your child? It is a tricky but useful skill. The writing which will support this unit of inquiry is explanation and report. We began by immersing ourselves in explanation texts and finding the common features of each. This co created checklist will be used to refer to throughout the rest of our unit when writing explanations.
Maths
Whilst continuing our problem solving using multiplicative thinking, we discovered that there are some places where we need to pause and gain a few more skills before being able to continue to problem solve. Therefore this week we have been inquiring into different strategies to solve multiplications. It seems many of us are using the formal column method, but we are unsure of why we do what we do. For example, what does ‘carrying’ mean? Why ‘carry’ the one into the next column? Our understanding of multiplication can be enhanced if we inquire into several different ways to multiply large numbers. Some of these written strategies include the Grid Method and Repeated Addition Method to start with. Along with these written methods, we are learning several mental multiplication methods, through playing games. So far, these include estimating our answers by rounding a number to ten or a hundred before multiplying and also partitioning into H,T,U and multiplying each separately.
Reminders:
- ONE LAST REMINDER: all these lovely children’s clothes left over from camp, will be disposed of if they are still not reclaimed by Monday 12th December
- Friday 9th December: School Disco for all the family
- Tuesday 13th December: Term ends at midday
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.
