Blog Challenge Winners

Over the past term Grade 5/6 have participated in a blog challenge. They had to try and get as many of their friends and family to comment on our blog as possible. This was a good way to get more family members interested in and become apart of what we are doing at school. It was so great to see the enthusiasm of students and family members!

Yesterday was the day when our winners were announced. It was a close call and after some last minute comments, it was Kyla who won the prize for the most comments.

Kyla had many of her friends and family come to visit our blog and leave valuable comments. Kyla won some Smiggle Gel Pens, a $15 Smiggle voucher and a Guest Post Coupon for our blog. Congratulations Kyla!

As part of our challenge we also had a prize for the person who had someone from another country leave a comment on our blog. Congratualtions to Duarte and thank you to his uncle in Portugal for taking time to visit us and leave a comment. Duarte won some Smiggle products!

The blog challenge also encouraged many students in our class to become more interested in blogging. So many students took time to leave quality comments. It was great to see the improvements and developments being made in commenting skills. Campbell, Cheuk Yue and Vishal all exceeded Miss Spink's expectations in their development of their commenting skills and as a result each won a Guest Post Coupon for the blog!

A fantastic effort by everyone involved!

What did you like most about the blog challenge?

Do you have any advice for students who get to write a guest post?

Online Safety

 

Over the past few months in Grade 5/6 we have been learning about keeping safe online.

This is a very important issue and it is extremely important that both students, parents and teachers know the appropriate ways to behave online. 

We have been participating in a unit called 'My Digital World' where we are investigating the many issues involved with becoming responsible digital citizens. 

This includes:

• :  Respect
• :  Who am I online? Who are my friends online?
• :  Protecting my online identity
• :  Protecting my online privacy
• Protecting myself from cyber bullying. 

We have watched these two videos and it has made us more aware of what is accepted as safe online behaviours. 

 

 

We also made this Glog to share our ideas-

http://missspink.edu.glogster.com/online-safety/

Explain some ways you are being safe online.

Why is being safe online important?

Solving Word Problems

Being able to solve word problems is very important in maths.

When we solve word problems we always follow a process-

 

We have been working hard this week on using all of our subtraction strategies to solve subtraction word problems. 

Here is one we completed today-

Can you solve some of our word problems using different subtraction strategies? Challenge yourself!

What strategies did you use to solve these problems? 

Can you write a subtraction word problem of your own in your comment?

Why do we blog?

In Grade 5/6 we think blogging is very important. There are many reasons why we have a class blog and the diagram below outlines what we think are the most important reasons.

Since starting our blog at the beginning of this year we have had many visitors. This week we reached our first 1000 visitors. What an achievement!

It is also important to note that our work is being shared with an authentic global audience made up of other schools, teachers, students and community members. Our blog has been visited by 25 countries. How exciting!

 

It is really exciting when we get comments from other countries and even other places across Australia. Here we had posts from another Grade 6 class from Cranbourne East PS and another from Taradale Intermediate School which is in New Zealand!

What makes blogging even more special in our grade is when we get comments from our family and friends. This shows us that people care about and are interested in what we do at school! As our Term 2 blogging challenge continues, it has been very exciting to read comments from our parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. There are only 4 days left until the challenge ends and anyone could win!

 

If you would like some more information about blogs- check out this Brainpop video-

http://www.brainpop.com/english/writing/blogs/

What do you like best about having a class blog?

How does having a class blog help your learning? 

Making Connections

Over the past two weeks in reading we have been learning to make connections.

Good readers make connections when they read to deepen their understanding and bring meaning to what they have read.

There are many ways to make a connection. We can make connections to ourselves, other texts we have read, things happening in the world and things we see and hear through the media.

We know the difference between making a deep connections and a flat connection. We all try to make deep connections with whatever we are reading.

We have brainstormed some sentence stems to help us making deep, meaningful connections.

 What connections can you make to the book you are reading at the moment?

Use the sentence stems to help you. 

Describe whether it is a deep or flat connection.

Subtraction Strategies

Did you know that there are many different ways to solve subtraction problems?

In our last post we talked about solving subtraction problems using the vertical method with and without regrouping. Sometimes when we need to solve subtraction problems in everyday life, like when we are shopping, we do not always have a pencil and piece of paper handy.

In the last few weeks we have been learning a variety of different strategies that we can use to solve subtraction problems in our heads.

Here are the strategies we have learnt:

  

 

 

 

 

Have you used these strategies before?

What strategy do you think you use the most and why?

How has learning these strategies helped you to understand subtraction?

Learning about Subtraction

This week in 5/6 A, we have been learning more about Subtraction.

Some of us have expanded our knowledge by teaching others how to complete subtraction problems with renaming and borrowing.

We have practised these skills, working in pairs and completing word problems. We had to find the distance from one place to another by subtracting the kilometres.  To help us remember how to complete subtraction problems with renaming one group made some posters.

 

Miss Spink also taught us a little rhyme to help us remember.

Elysse shows us how she solved a problem.

Test your subtraction with renaming  / regrouping with this game! Don't forget a pencil and paper to help you work out the answers!

How did you feel about teaching another student about subtraction with renaming? 

What did you find challenging about this activity?

Reading in 5/6 A

In our classroom we think reading is very important and a skill that we will need and use for the rest of our lives!

In Reading we use a CAFE Menu. CAFE is an acronym for Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency and Extended Vocabulary. We remember what each of these headings mean by reminding oursleves what we do as good readers-



I understand what I read

I can read the words

I can read accurately, with expression, and understand what I read

I know, find, and use interesting words

Everyday we learn and practsise different CAFE strategies. We usually start with the whole class and read a shared text to practise the strategy. At the moment we are reading 'Silver Key- The Beginning' by NJ Cameron. While we have been reading this book we have been working hard on improving our reading fluency. We have unpacked fluency and have learnt about each of the dimensions. The dimensions of fluency are pace / rate, pausing, intonation, stress, phrasing and integration.

 This is what our CAFE menu looks like-

After we have done our whole class focus we write the startegy on a card and put in on our CAFE menu. We then do independent reading where we read 'Good Fit' books to practise these strategies. While we are reading Miss Spink has reading conferences with different students. During the conferences we work with Miss Spink to choose a reading goal. Our reading goal is something we need to practise to improve our reading. We then put our name next to the strategy we are practising!

What is your reading goal at the moment?

Has your fluency improved since learning about the 6 dimensions? Why? 

What is the best thing about CAFE?

Blog Challenge

This month we are having a Blog Challenge! Our challenge is to get as many family and friends to visit and comment on our blog as possible! We are off to a great start and it has only been going a day!

The challenge was set to encourage more parents, family and friends to become a part of our learning.

We have until the 28th of June. We are keeping a tally to record how many comments we get by different students' friends and family!

Miss Spink's friends and family have also been on our blog to comment to show us exactly how easy it is to get people on board! We have had comments from her Aunty, a cousin and lots of her friends! 

If you are a friend or family member of any on of us in grade 5/6 please take part in our challenge and become involved in our learning journey! If you are unsure about writing blog comments please read our blogging guidelines http://acps456.blogspot.com.au/p/blogging-guidelines.html.

On Thursday the 28th June (the 2nd last day of term) we will tally up all the comments. The student with the most amount of friends and family who have commented will get a special prize. There will also be a prize for students who have friends and relatives in other countries. We will see who is able to get someone to comment from the furtherest country from Australia!

Friends and family do not only have to comment on this post but on any of our posts! Just make sure you sign off with your name, who you know from our class and how you are related, eg Regards, Cheryl (Miss Spink's Mum).

Being a Better Buddy!

Better Buddies is an initiative of The Alannah and Madeline Foundation designed to create friendly and caring school communities where bullying is reduced. As part of this program each class at Aitken Creek has been given a buddy class and each student has been paired up with a buddy in that class. Our buddy class is P/1 B with Miss Markidis.

Over the past few weeks we have been involved in different activities to learn how to be a good buddy and promote friendly and caring attitudes across our school.

We attended a Better Buddies Game Day with players from the Richmond Tigers to learn some games that we could teach to and play with our younger buddies. It was great getting to meet some Tigers players and learn some fun games. We followed this up by having our own games day at school. It was great fun and we are proud of being able to be responsible role models for the younger students in our school.You can read more about the day on The Alannah and Madeline Foundation website.

 

On Friday 1st June it was National Buddy Day. To celebrate national buddy day we did a special activity with our buddies to help them remember how to brush their teeth properly.

 

As well as being 'Better Buddies' with P/1 B we have also connected with some other classes across the school. We regularly catch up with Miss Canals and P/1 A for some buddy reading sessions and today we even helped Mrs Fraser teach P A about left and right by teaching them a dance.

We think creating a school culture of 'Better Buddies' is fantastic! 

What is the best thing about being a buddy?

What are two things you would like to teach your buddy? 

Why do you think being a buddy is important? 

The Lunar Cycle

This Term in Inquiry we have been learning about Earth and its place in our Solar System.

We have investigated different elements that make up our solar system including stars, planets, asteroids, the sun and dwarf planets.

In groups we researched different planets and created information posters or PowrPoints about them. Then we got to make our planets using paper mache`.

Saturn PowerPoint by Adison

Over the past two weeks whe have been discovering facts about the Lunar Cycle. We made representations of the phases of the moon using oreo biscuits, learnt a phases of the moon rap song and are writing explanations to explain what we know about the Lunar Cycle.

Here is a video that explains the phases of the moon. 

Our Oreo biscuit phases of the moon-

Learn the Phases of the Moon song-

 

We were also very lucky to go to Scienceworks and the Melbourne Planetarium. In the Planetarium show 'TILT' we explored how the four seasons are caused by the tilt of the Earth's axis combined with the Earth’s orbit around the Sun and how the seasons and length of day vary across the Earth, from the poles to the equator. At the Scienceworks show we explored the phases of the Moon and the movement of the Moon around the Earth as it affects the tides.

What has been your favourite part about Inquiry this term?

What are two new things you have learnt this term?