Yr5 Weekly Update – 01/06/17
Central Idea: Biodiversity relies on maintaining a balance within nature
We hope that everyone has had a lovely holiday and managed to relax a bit. It’s been wonderful to have the children back in school, looking refreshed and happy to begin our second term!
UOI
This week we are beginning to move into the ‘finding out’ phase of our inquiry. On Wednesday, students had the opportunity to attend two out of five possible sessions to explore the causes and effects of biodiversity loss. Topics covered included: deforestation, pollution, the disappearance of bees, overfishing, and the Barrier Reef. We reflected on how these issues connect to humans and discussed our responsibilities in regards to protecting our environment. After these sessions, children formed ‘jigsaw’ groups with the purpose of sharing what they learned with others who did not attend their session. Jigsaw is a strategy that emphasises cooperative learning by providing students an opportunity to actively help each other build comprehension.
Literacy
Before the holidays, we focused on summarising and identifying key ideas when reading. These skills will not only help students become better readers but also become more successful researchers. This week, we focused on another invaluable reading skill that will further support student understanding when researching. This skill is called ‘synthesising’. Synthesising involves beginning with prior knowledge of a topic, then gaining new knowledge about that topic from a variety of sources, combining and analysing this information, and finally, making an evaluation to form new understandings. We would encourage you to help consolidate this skill at home when reading with your child. You can do this by asking about the important ideas in a text, encouraging your child to connect those ideas to their own background knowledge and to have them ask questions in order to develop new understanding of the topic.
To support our learning in the current Unit of Inquiry, we are continuing to explore how to write successful explanation texts. Students have co created checklists and have used these to help write an explanation based on one of the rotations (on biodiversity loss) they attended earlier in the week.
Maths
We have continued this week on working to problem solve using multiplicative thinking. Through our learning tasks, we discovered that sometimes solving multiplication and division problems is about finding patterns. In addition, we explored how patterns can also be used as a check for accuracy in that we can tell the units digit of the product from the units digits of the numbers being multiplied.
Here are a couple of examples of the problems students were asked to solve:
I did a multiplication question correctly for homework, but my printer ran out of ink.
I remember it looked like 2 _ x 3 _ = _ _ 0
What might be the digits that did not print? (Give as many answers as you can)
What might be the missing numbers?
__ × __ = __ 0 1 _ x _ = _ 0
Convince me that you have all the possible solutions
Why not invite your child to share strategies they used to work out their answers?
Reminders:
Sports Day is next Thursday morning 9:15 am – 11:15 am. Please remember to return the reply slip to your child’s teacher if they are going home afterwards.
Homelearning:
- Twenty minutes daily reading;
Find an amazing nature fact to add to the class poster;
- Try some of the online maths activities to reinforce learning in multiplication and division using MyMaths, Table Trees, Moon Maths or these online games.
Sharing learning through ‘jigsawing’ after the biodiversity rotations
