Welcome back to Cyan Fort Street! Thank you for all the support and hard work in promoting learning and excellence for your child, last term. We established many baselines and worked hard into improving ourselves, especially in our problem solving and literacy. We hope to see this reflected in the Year 5 NAPLAN results which are due in late August or early September. As for current learning, I hope to share with you more of your child's writing and achievement this term on our blog, www.ericmccarron.com.

This term we will continue to build our persuasive and imaginative writing skills--so get out your beloved books, dictionaries and thesaurus! Last term we focused heavily on audience, punctuation, sentence structure, ideation, persuasive devices, setting and characterisation. While building upon those writing aspects, we will also focus on cohesion, paragraphing and vocabulary. For a breakdown of any of these writing aspects, please see this helpful website designed by the NSW Department of Education.

http://www.schoolatoz.nsw.edu.au/homework-and-study/english/english-a-to-z

Our class novel this term is the award winning book, My Life as an Alphabet, by Barry Jonsberg. The book is fantastic for studying writing craft but also explores the themes of Acceptance, Truth & Fiction, Labelling and Relationships. For more info on the book or to purchase a hard copy, click here.

https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/childrens/childrens-fiction/My-Life-As-an-Alphabet-Barry-Jonsberg-9781743310977

For an electronic copy

Kindle:

https://www.amazon.com.au/My-Life-Alphabet-Barry-Jonsberg-ebook/dp/B00B7BOGQK

iBooks:

https://itunes.apple.com/au/book/my-life-as-an-alphabet/id596652287?mt=11

To support class reading, may I request that parents purchase a copy of this book for their child, either paper back or electronic would be great. Thank you.

English homework will range from weekly spelling tasks, often definition and example sentence activities, reading tasks, students are asked to independently be reading at least 30 minutes per day, and finally to writing tasks on a range of projects, from reports, posters, speeches to creative writing.

Our sequence of learning in mathematics this term follows:

Year 5

Decimals

Weeks 1-4

Skills Spectrum:

• Foundation Skills: Conversion, multiplication, division by 10s/100s/1000s, Fraction multiplication,

• Rounding, Approximation and Estimation

• Multiplication by tens, hundreds and thousands

• Division by tens, hundreds and thousands

• Multiplication by 2-digit whole numbers

• Conversion of measurements

• Problem solving with Decimals

Percent

Weeks 5-7

Skills Spectrum

• Foundation:

• Percent

• Expressing Fractions as Percents

• Percentage of a Quantity

• Problem Solving with Percent

Average

Weeks 8

Skills Spectrum

• Foundation Skills

• Understanding Average

• Problem Solving with Rate

Rate

Weeks 9

Skills Spectrum

• Foundation Skills

• Rate

• Problem Solving with Rate

Review

Week 10

Remedial & Extension Lessons

Year 6

Percent

Weeks 1-3

Skills Spectrum:

• Foundation Skills in Percent

• Part of a Whole as a Percent

• One Quantity as a Percentage of Another

• Problem Solving with Percent

Speed

Weeks 4-5

Skills Spectrum

• Foundation Skills in Speed

• Speed and Average Speed

• Problem Solving with Speed

Circles

Weeks 6-8

Skills Spectrum

• Foundation Skills in Circles

• Radius and Diameter

• Circumference

• Area

• Problem Solving with Circles

Review

Weeks 9-10

Remedial & Extension Lessons

Maths homework will always follow the lessons. If a student is having trouble, please feel free to notify me or you can support using http://www.schoolatoz.nsw.edu.au/homework-and-study/maths/maths-a-to-z. Khan Academy also has great resources for developing maths' skills and mastery www.khanacademy.com

Science

Cyan will cover physics this term, looking at Light. The learning provides opportunities for students to explore the properties of light and how it enables us to see. Students’ thinking about light and its role in our lives and our community will be developed using hands-on activities. Through investigations students explain how objects reflect, absorb and refract light, and how we can use light to meet our needs. For our upcoming Science Week, we also have independent experiments for students to showcase.

Kidpreneur (Social Studies & Economics)

Cyan is also participating in the Club Kidpreneur program this term, igniting their entrepreneurial mindset through real world, product-based learning experiences. Students work in small teams to build a micro-business, sell hand-made products at a market, and donate their profits to social causes. They can choose to pitch their ideas to entrepreneurs in the National Kidpreneur Challenge. More info here: http://clubkidpreneur.com/challenge/

Physical Development, Health & Physical Education

Cyan is lucky to have professional gymnastic teachers extend their physical development this term. At the moment, sports uniform will be required on Thursday and Friday (though this may change). Circle Time is used to develop emotional literacy and mentorship skills are further developed with the Buddy Program. This is further supplemented with the Mindfulness program using reflection and meditation.

Creative Arts and Performing Arts

Building on top of our drawing skills developed in Term 1 & 2, a range of media will be used to further our creative arts skills. Moreover, Ms Scaysbrook will be taking the class for music lessons.

Languages: Mandarin

Ni hao! Our lessons in one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, Mandarin, will also continue this term, Wednesdays. Xie Xie!

Years 5 and 6 gain the lion's share of extra-curricular activities. I highly encourage students to join and broaden their experience. A timetable of the range of extra-curricular activities this term is below (timetable subject to change).