What a week and a half! We have begun our 2019 learning journey with enthusiasm and positivity in Room 29 – here are just a few of the tasks we have undertaken to start our learning in Year 5:

Our Big Idea for Term 1

Our Big Idea this term is Identity. We began sharing what we thought identity was and came up with a list of similar and interesting ideas to the question ‘What is Identity?’:

• Everyone has a different one
• Who you are
• What you look like
• Age
• Hobbies
• Personality
• Names – first, last
• Gender
• Fingerprints
• Digital footprints
• Music you listen to
• Culture
• Religion
• Background / History
• Likes/dislikes
• Clothes
• School / Job
• Food
• Community

We will keep adding and building on our ideas through the term so we can all create a personal definition of what identity is.

Sharing our identity through Bioglyphs

We began getting to know our new classmates and sharing information with each other by focusing on our identity. We created a picture that used symbols to visually represented parts of our identities and then became detectives to find out which bioglyph matched which classmate. We had to choose questions that would gain us the most information and make decisions about what information we were going to focus on to match the bioglyph to a classmate. It was lots of fun to do this and we could have kept going all day! Some of us managed to match between 9-12 classmates (although some of these were matched with information already known from previous years!) Feel free to walk past our window and see all of our bioglyphs – can you match one to someone you know in our class?

Linking learning with texts

This term we are reading the novel ‘Wonder’ by R.J. Palacio. There are only one or two of us who have read the book or seen the movie which means we are all along for the ride with this book together! The book is about a boy called August Pullman and we have learnt that he was born with cleft palates (split in the roof of his mouth) and some other anomalies that left him with a weird face. He has had over 27 surgeries and he is only 10 years old. He has not been to school, he does not have a lot of friends and he has an older sister called Via who has yells at kids for making noises at him. August is about to go to school and start the 5th grade. We are looking forward to finding out more about August and how he finds school.

Using our reading strategies to decode a text

We began revising the reading strategies of Predicting and Questioning this week using evidence and reasoning to justify our thinking. To practise these strategies in a different way, we were given a text that was coded in a different font and asked to decode it. We began by predicting what letters some of the symbols could match to and using logic and reasoning to support our predictions. We then were able to ask questions and continue to decode the text using the context of what we were decoding along the way to make sure the text continued to make sense. This was so much fun to complete, we asked Ms Huntly if we could do another one – she is planning one as we speak! Look below to see a sample of what we were trying to decode:

Kids Helpline @ School

As a way of discussing Safer Internet Day and ways we can be safe online, we took part in a Kids Helpline @ School session on Digital Identity and living up to values online. We discussed what digital footprints were and how everything you do online is permanent. We came up with ways we can be safe online and how what you do online should be what you would be willing to say or do in real life. It was an interesting session and we all took away at least one thing that we will try to remember when using online sites and games.

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We look forward to sharing our learning journey in Year 5 with you – please leave comments below and we will respond as soon as we can!

~ 5A