Dear Parents and Guardians,
Welcome to another year. We hope you have all had a restful summer break. We look forward to spending our first term with our Year 5 and 6 students, as they embark on another year of fruitful learning.
Challenge Camp
We have our Challenge Camp on February 21 – February 23 2024. We would like all children to come to camp as it will help our learning community get to know each other for the year ahead. Your child would have taken home their camp permission forms last week. Please complete and return them as soon as possible for us to continue with camp preparations.
Student Wellbeing
Student well-being continues to be an important focus for us this year. A student’s wellbeing impacts their learning at school and to ensure that students can concentrate and learn well at school, it is important to provide them with enough food for their day. Please ensure to provide students with enough healthy food for both lunch and recess, a water bottle and a fruit snack for the day. We appreciate and thank you in advance for your support.
Below is an outline of the curriculum that we will be covering this term.
Investigations
Our Investigations topic for this term focuses on personal and social skills. Students will explore what it means to be a successful learner in the Challenge community. They will examine the behaviours, dispositions and mindsets that positively influence their personal and social lives at school. They will be supported to research, present and explain their personal strengths and their weaknesses as a learner. In the latter half of the term, students will be encouraged to reflect on themselves as a leader and participate in student leadership elections.
English
During the term in Reading, the students will be working towards establishing good reading habits. Their main focus will be to develop their reading skills such as their reading stamina, and their abilities to comprehend literal and inferential meanings from text and express them.
For Writing this term, students will be focusing on creating engaging narrative texts, by using a variety of simple, compound and complex sentences. They will also learn how to capture the reader’s attention using interesting story starters. In the second half of the term, the students will be transitioning to learning more about writing persuasive texts. They will be provided experiences to practice writing that convinces their readers using a variety of persuasive techniques.
Furthermore, this will be evident in the leadership speeches that students will be creating and presenting as part of their learning for Investigations. We will continue using the Bump It Up Wall to improve students’ writing craft. The students will use the visible ‘I can’ statements to identify specific areas to make changes to their writing.
Numeracy
For Numeracy this term, the students will be developing their understanding on the following topics:
Number and Algebra:
- – Identifying numbers up to seven or more digits using the place value system.
- – Developing their understanding of negative integers.
Statistics and Data:
- – List and describe probable outcomes of events occurring using percentages, fractions and numerical scales (ie: 0-100).
Measurement and Geometry:
- – Solving problems using regular and irregular shapes.
- – Connect objects to their nets using spatial and geometric reasoning.
Auslan
Students will continue to communicate through Auslan authentically in Term One. They will be communicating their thoughts while playing games, to show their understanding or confusion.
Religion
For Term One, the students will be learning about the sacred nature of prayers. They will learn to compose different types of prayers for different purposes. Students will participate in school liturgies during the Lenten period. They will explore the significance of the Easter story and its relation to the Catholic Church community. Students will be creating artworks for the Stations of the Cross as part of their integrated religious education studies.
Reading Diaries
Your child would have received their reading diary during the first week of school. It is an expectation that all students at St Lawrence read for 20 minutes every school night. Students will use their reading diary to record details (Title of the book, pages read and parent signature) on the day they have read at home. Your child’s teachers will collect the student diaries every fortnight, to check and ensure they have been reading every day.
Unfinished schoolwork:
To promote student accountability towards managing their learning during class time, students may take home unfinished school work to complete at home should they not manage to complete it at school. Students will be asked to return their completed work the next day to their teachers. This is to prepare our students for the increased independent learning responsibility and demands in secondary school.
Contact details
If you would like to contact us via email, our email addresses* are: Thomas Punzalan – thomas.punzalan@slweirviews.catholic.edu.au Natalie Bruzzesse-Natalie.bruzzesse@slweirviews.catholic.edu.au
*Please note that we will endeavour to respond to emails within 24-48 hours within the working week. We are not able to respond to emails after school hours.
Kind regards,
Natalie Bruzzesse and Thomas Punzalan
Challenge Learning Community Teachers