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!