25 Jan 2019

Yr5 Curriculum Update – 25/01/19

Working together to achieve success for every child

 

 

Unit of Inquiry

The visit of Christian Action was definitely one of the highlights of these two weeks. Through the personal stories of our guests – the asylum seekers and refugees who are receiving help from Christian Action, the students came to a deeper understanding of the concepts of our unit :

Causation – the reason why people migrate.

Change – the positive and negative effects of migration to a person and to the countries involved.

Perspective – how individuals and communities respond differently to the changes brought by migration.

Apart from gaining a deeper understanding to these concepts, the students were also inspired and motivated to take action to help the refugees.

“I like the visit of Christian Action and what I learned about their lives.” 5P Tanya

 

Action

Research – some students have decided to take action through researching more about the push & pull factors of migration. Some have already started writing stories about migration.

Indirect –   some students have decided to take action through organizing donations for Christian Action.

Advocacy – some students have decided to write stories about refugees to raise the awareness of their plight.

Apart from these asylum seekers and refugees, many students have also greatly benefited from the migration stories their parents shared with them.

“I like the way we have been learning to sort the push & pull factors of migration.” 5P Prisha

 

Literacy

The students continue reading various fiction and non-fiction texts about different migratory journeys made by different people for various reasons. Many of them are enjoying EPIC – a digital library available for all KJS students.

Through this unit, the students are developing a specific reading skill – making inferences. They are learning to use their schema (background knowledge) and text clues to infer the messages that are not explicitly spelt out by the authors.

After interviewing their parents and hearing from the speakers of Christian Action, the students have also started writing migration stories in both prose and poetry.

“I really enjoy doing the “Diving Giraffe” activity. We got to use our imagination and write a story on the computer. It was fun. 5M Phil

“I really enjoy doing the reading activities because they are all about migration.” 5M Yug

 

Maths

In order to collect quantitative data about migration, the students have collaboratively formu

lated questions, created google forms and sent their surveys to various classes. They have enjoyed interpreting the data collected.

In the maths lessons, the students have been learning how to use the google spreadsheet to create different kinds of charts, how to customize those charts and how to find the mean, mode and median of the given data.

The four operations, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are also part of our mathematics focus at the moment and learners have been finding their own methods for solving problems using those.  This open, inquiry-based approach to mathematical learning allows the students to develop invented strategies of computing which can vary with the numbers and situation in a particular engagement.  Importantly, operating in this way requires that the child grasps the process and the outcome of the process used, as opposed to simply knowing that the outcome is correct.

“I have been enjoying doing decimals and learning new strategies for maths.” 5S Shivenah

“I enjoy learning new strategies about maths.” 5S Serena

 

Chinese Year 5:

In the Chinese classrooms, we continue to focus on the concept of wellbeing and providing different learning opportunities for children to explore their own interests and promote agentic learning.

Here is a glimpse of some of our classrooms:

Important days

Saturday 26 January     ESF Hong Kong Run 2019

Friday 1 February          Normal school day. School ends at 2:45 pm.

Friday 1 February          Mid-year reports to go home.

Monday 4 February       Beginning of Chinese New Year. No school.

Monday 11 February     School resumes.