North Melbourne Primary School

The Year 5 Team

Term 2 Curriculum Overview

We hope that you had a great holiday and are excited for the term ahead. This term in Week 5, we will celebrate Education week. This is an opportunity for all schools to showcase the wonderful achievements of students and share their learning spaces. Further information will be provided closer to the date via Compass. 

Term 2 Curriculum

In Reading, students are continuing to develop their reading strategies. The strategies students are practising this term are predicting, visualising and synthesising. They will also focus on analysing text features, characters, and settings within texts. Students have commenced participating in literature circles (similar to book clubs) and each week are assigned a role which they will work on independently. At the conclusion of the week students participate in a group conference where they share their thinking and have literary discussions about the text.

In Writing, students are continuing to take part in the Writer’s Workshop. This term, students will be focusing on using information to clarify and strengthen their ideas, engage their audience and enhance meaning through a range of interesting and engaging leads, sentence lengths and paragraphing strategies. They will also strengthen their writer’s voice by integrating awareness of who their target audience is in the writing process to engage readers and highlight their opinion and purpose. Students will be writing multimodal texts with complex sentences, technical vocabulary, and text structures that suit the intended purpose and audience.

In Mathematics, students will continue to use their understanding of place value and create connections to other Mathematical strands. Students will focus on recognising the connection between multiplication and division, and develop families of number facts. They will be able to recognise and develop a range of strategies when solving numerical and worded number sentences, in conjunction with concrete, representation, and abstract thinking. Students will develop connections to objects and build their two-dimensional nets using spatial and geometric reasoning. Students will also be using geometric materials and software to recognise and perform translations, reflections, and rotations of shapes and accurately measure angles in degrees using a protractor. Students will make connections to Shape knowledge, to choose appropriate units of measurement when identifying the length, mass, and capacity of an object, as well as describing regular and irregular shapes using appropriate metric units. Lastly, they will employ their measurement understanding to construct grid coordinate maps to locate positions within a space.

In Inquiry, students will be continuing their investigation into Australian History, from pre-colonisation to the current day. They will be exploring the cause and effects of why people came to Australia and how they have shaped Australia. Students will research and develop a project based on a variety of multimedia resources and experiences provided by the teaching team.

In Wellbeing, students will be learning about our school values (Responsible, Inclusive, Sagacious, and Ethical- RISE) and expectations as part of the School Wide Positive Behaviour Support (SWPBS) that focus on teaching everyone at NMPS the agreed expected behaviours, to create a safer and more effective school environment. Students will learn how to manage difficult situations and how to identify ways to show respect and understand others perspectives. Students will also be participating in three Sexual Education sessions across the term. Students across the school will be involved in their class’ morning circle. The purpose of a morning circle is to establish a positive classroom environment by starting each day with an Acknowledgement of Country, greetings, and announcements. Additionally, classroom teachers may include a short activity to engage students for the day ahead.

Homework Expectations

From Week 2, after settling back into a school routine, Year 5 homework tasks will commence. Each Monday of this term, students will be assigned two Mathletics tasks to be completed over the week, which will be due the following Monday. The tasks will cover the different numeracy strands of the Victorian Curriculum, as well as problem solving and reasoning challenges. Students will be reminded about their homework expectations throughout the week and will also have an opportunity to complete any remaining tasks in ‘Homework club’ (Mondays during second break). We also expect our students to be reading for at least 30 minutes independently each day. 

To support your child’s learning at home, here are some things you can do: 

• Encourage reading every night – including short periods of read-aloud. We cannot stress how important reading every day is. A student who reads less than a minute per day outside of school reads only 8,000 to 21,000 words per year. However, a student reading 20 minutes daily outside of school reads almost 2 million words yearly!
• Use real-life opportunities such as shopping and cooking to discuss money, addition and other mathematical concepts.
• Write at home – it can be about anything. The more short pieces your child can write, the better writer they will become.
• Encourage random acts of kindness. This could be anything from using manners to writing a card to a grandparent. 

Kind Regards, 

Ari, Caen, Hayley, Natalie, Richard, Molly and Sonia

The Grade 5 Teaching Team