Goodness me, it’s Week 7 already! Where is the term going?

There is not much more of the school year to go and only two blog posts after this one to share celebrate what has been happening in our class. Then you’ll be reading blog posts that share and celebrate the work we are doing as Grade 6s!

So what have we been doing? Well, let’s have a quick look at just a couple of things we’ve been up to in 5C.

Reading

Several students in the class have been participating in Literature Circles. This is where a small group of students (about 5) read the same novel as one another and meet once a week to discuss the book. The group agrees where they will read up to before each meeting and each member of the group has a different task to complete to bring along to the meeting and to lead a discussion about. The three texts being read at the moment are ‘Frindle’, ‘Fog a Dox’ and ‘The Twits’. It is a great way to engage in books, talk about them with peers and to try different comprehension skills.

Writing

Explanations and constructing clear paragraphs has been a focus for us lately. While we are still continuing to check our writing has a variety of sentence types (simple, compound and complex) we are also working at the paragraph level. We know that a paragraph should be about one particular aspect of what we are writing about, it should have a topic sentence at the start and then several supporting details that relate to the topic sentence. In total, we are aiming to have at least 4-5 sentences in our paragraphs to make sure we have provided enough information or examples. One topic we have been doing this on is natural disasters.

Numeracy

Last week saw us finishing up some Rich Assessment tasks. What are Rich Assessment tasks? Well, they are ways for us to show our understanding of mathematical concepts in more authentic ways. For example, rather than just drawing clocks,we created mini-timetables and read a train timetable as well. Rather than just drawing symmetrical patterns, we looked at how logos use different types of transformation and created our own logos.

We are also revisiting how to draw number lines and to put fractions on them. To do this, we needed to go over our division skills so that we were able to break our number lines into equal parts. The process was that we rolled a dice two times to get our numerator and our denominator. We then drew a number line that was 10cm long and labeled it with 0 at one end and 1 at the other. After this, we divided our 10cm line by the denominator and that gave us the length of each segment for our number line. This allowed us to draw the fractions increments on the number line. We could then use our numerator to locate exactly where the fraction should go. This was fairly challenging as there were were many skills we had to use (measurement, division, fraction knowledge) so we might continue having some practice at this one!

CBL

Watch this space. Currently we are getting ready to share our second round of research. After coming up with a science wondering, researching the answer to it and presenting our findings earlier on in the term, we then picked a second wondering and went through the process again, with our presentations occurring next week. After this we will have some strong ideas about what we would like to do for our Challenge project, with our challenge being: Explain a Process of Change.

We’ll see you on here again in a fortnight so until then, goodbye!

And just like that, it’s time for another update of what has been happening in 5C.

Numeracy

Numeracy took an unexpected turn last Friday, in more ways than one! We have been looking at probability and how to record events in fraction, decimal and percentage form. On Friday, however, we had to record the chance of events happening for a packet of Skittles called ‘Zombie Skittles’. We were each given a fun-size packet of ‘Zombie Skittles’ which contained 15 lollies. The flavours were strawberry (red), grape (purple), lemon (yellow), lime (green) and rotten zombie (orange). We had to predict how many of each colour we thought we would get and record our predictions as fractions, decimals and percentages. We then got to open our packets and, without looking at the lollies, we picked one-at-a-time and put it into our mouths. Once we new what flavour we had, we added it to a tally table to gather our data.  The only thing was sometimes those lollies we put in our mouth were orange and gee did they taste disgusting! We had to have our water on stand-by and a tissue to either get rid of the taste, if we managed to eat the rotten zombie Skittle, or spit it out if it was too gross! When all of the lollies were eaten, we used the information from our tally to record the actual fractions, decimals and percentages of each flavoured Skittle. This was then turned into a graph to represent the information visually. The best visuals of all, however, were of the disgusted faces when we got an orange Skittle and the smiles on our faces because we all had a lot of fun!

Literacy

A big focus in literacy at the moment has been on word types and sentence types. We’ve been revisiting nouns and verbs and seeing that for a sentence to convey an idea it must contain both of those things. There are then different kinds of sentences we can write: simple, compound and complex. Simple sentences only contain one clause, while compound and complex ones contain two or more, with the clauses being linked by conjunctions. This can then go even further, with there being questions, statements, commands and exclamations – all of which require particular punctuation. As well as learning about these things, we have come to appreciate that language has many different parts and that there are many different conventions we need to follow in order to make our writing clear, accurate an effective. We will continue to look at word and sentence types because it has not been easy and practice, practice, practice is the way we become stronger with things we find challenging.

CBL

On Friday of Week 4 we were lucky to watch a live presentation by Canadian astronaut, Chris Hadfield. He shared his journey to becoming an astronaut and how his dream of going to space started when he was 10 years of age. This was also the age at which he started working towards his goal, beginning with learning to scuba dive as soon as he was able to, becoming a pilot, studying engineering, becoming a glider pilot, becoming a test pilot, learning French and Russian, and training with NASA.

Chris showed us that learning never stops and he asked us to think about how we are different today to how we were yesterday.

When we reflected on how we have changed over the last 6 months, some us of have become more confident with numeracy, some have improved in sporting activities like kicking a football or roller skating, others have become better cooks and others have learned to appreciate their families more.

As well as thinking about how we have changed, Chris challenged us to think about what are we going to do next to keep changing, keep learning, keep improving.

Some other quotes from Chris were:

“Life is more interesting when you’re learning something.”

“It would be a sad day to have not learnt anything.”

“We need to work together. We need to know how to put other things that are more important than just us front of ourselves.”

How have you changed in the last 6 months? What are you going to do next? We’d love to hear about it!