2 Mar 2018

Yr5 Curriculum Update – 09/03/18

Working together to achieve success for every child

Our Transdisciplinary Unit of Inquiry: Where we are in place and time: “Humans continue to migrate for many reasons”

Dear Parents

Happy New Year and welcome back after a rather extended CNY break. Hopefully the school closure was a chance to catch up and enjoy some unexpected family time.

Our Unit of Inquiry on Migration is drawing to a conclusion. We hosted five speakers from Christian Action to give classes first-hand stories of the experience of being refugees. Students were invited to do some more finding out about the work that Christian Action does to help some of the worlds most vulnerable people.

The chance to collect data through asking interview questions was extremely valuable, especially given the highly authentic contexts of the speakers’ backgrounds. Teachers and students found the the experience truly humbling – the courage and sacrifice that people make around the world to protect their families is something that we should certainly share and raise awareness of. Lots of students wanted to take action to help people in refugee and asylum seeker situations and we will continue to inquire into ways we could do this.

Social Interactions – Our unit on Migration gives us the opportunity to interview people in our families and communities who have migrated at some point and collect some data first hand. An interview can be conducted face-to-face or via telephone/skype/facetime/email. We think it’s a really nice opportunity for students to interact with a family member they might not usually have the chance to speak to, or to find out more about someone they think they already know. We have prepared a basic interview process and a set of sample questions to use below. Students should record the data in some way, and it might be helpful to have a partner to help them do this. They can then share that data with their class after the holidays.

Our unit on Fractions has begun and we have been using a range of rich tasks to deepen the understanding students have of whole/part relationships. Students have had the chance to make their own fraction kits, define the terms involved in talking about fractions and solve increasingly complex problems involving fractional relationships. Learning about equivalent fractions has also been revisited. One of the key conceptual understandings that many students find challenging is the relationship between visual and numerical representations of fractions, and the relationship between ‘common’ fractions and their decimal fraction counterparts.

We have been focusing on VISUALISING as a reading comprehension strategy. Seeing the story unfold in our minds is a great way for us to understand the feelings and nuances of what we are reading. It is closely linked with the skill of INFERRING, or ‘reading between the lines’, which we are also beginning to cover. The linked site INTO THE BOOK is a good resource for games and information about specific reading comprehension strategies (click ‘skip login’ to access without signing up).

Students have written an extended narrative story about a migration context. The teachers have started to use these to identify to focus on over the next few weeks in terms of improving writing in the different 6 Traits of Writing.

These are