Year 5 Update Week 18
Thursday 31st January – CNY Assembly to parents
Friday 1st February – Chinese Cultural Day and CNY Assembly to school….please wear Chinese festive clothing.
Friday 1st February – last day of school before CNY break
Monday 11th February – back to school after CNY holiday
Tuesday 12th February – Year 5 Pizza Lunch
Tuesday 12th February – Sports Day for Year 1-2....classes as usual for us
Friday 15th February – Inclusivity House Assembly.…can Inclusivity house please wear blue today and bring some money for their nominated charity?
Thursday 21st February – Sports Day for Year 3-6.….please wear full PE kit today.
Tuesday 26th February – Year 2 Bake Sale.….please bring in some money to buy some baked goods to support our PTA.
Thursday 7th March – World Maths Day…..watch this space to see what exciting activities we’ll be up to!
Friday 8th March – Student-Led Conferences : these will be held in sessions throughout the day and the children will only come to school with you at your chosen time…..please book your preferred time on the Gateway which will be open soon.
Friday 15th March – Big Business Market and Sharing Morning to parents at 9 am
Friday 29th March – PTA International Food Fair
Thursday 4th April – ESF Choral Concert
Friday 5th April – Ching Ming Festival.….no school
Wednesday 10th April – Easter Concert
Friday 12 April – last day of school before Easter holidays, 12 pm finish
Big Business Funding and Help!!!
To make this UOI successful we are hoping for a little extra support from you at home. Mr Pheasant will be in contact soon letting you know of ways in which you can help out. If at all possible can you see if you can find time in your schedules to volunteer and to also support your child’s team by providing their share of the capital for their business. We look forward to seeing you all here for our Sharing Morning on 15th March at 9 am where you will be able to see all the children’s hard work from throughout this UOI….and experience our BB Market for yourself! Bring your pennies 🙂
Action in the PYP at BHS
It has been great celebrating the talents and achievements of our students through the ’Student Achievement’ section in the newsletter. We would like to do something similar with Student Action. Action in the PYP is when students are inspired through their learning and their experiences to make a difference in their lives or the community connected to real life issues and opportunities. We would like to celebrate our students taking action outside of school.
Please, could you email examples to me, andy.thompson@bhs.edu.hk and I will share through our newsletter?
There are different types of Action. We would like to start with a focus on Participation. See below for a definition and examples
| Type of Action | Examples |
| Participation
Being actively involved in their learning and contributing as an individual or a group |
Getting involved with community projects
Making appropriate choices and taking responsibility to help people Taking on different roles e.g. being a leader, completing my chores, working in a group, looking after my pet Taking part in any decision-making process Joining a new club |
Learning Centre – On days where the children visit the Learning Centre with their class, they will need to bring their book bags if they wish to borrow books. These days are as follows. The children also have access to our Learning Centre before school – so if they happen to forget their LC book on their specific day they can always pop up there and exchange it in the mornings after they unpack their school bag.
5D – Monday
5F – Tuesday
5C – Thursday
PE – please note that some PE lessons might have changed days. Can you please take a look at when your child’s PE days will be for this new UOI? Full PE kit must be worn on these days…thank you.
5D – Monday and Friday
5F – Wednesday and Thursday
5C – Wednesday and Friday
Book Drive – Brody, Ryan and Muchan in Year 6 are organising a Book Drive to help spread our love of reading. The Sony Corporation will collect books to create mobile libraries in South Africa for schools that do not have enough books for children to read. If you have books that are:
- written in the English language
- suitable for 6-12-year-olds
- pages should be not yellow or brown (due to ageing)
- no missing or torn pages
- no scribble on the pages
- no textbooks
- no encyclopedias
- no magazines
Please send them to school. There will be a collection box in the school foyer from Monday 21st January. Any books you can donate will help spread the enjoyment of reading.
Big Business Begins (officially!)
Unscramble the Central Idea – we began the unit this week by tuning in to our Central Idea. Here’s 5F working on our group unscrambles…..
Caine’s Arcade Provocation and Pre-assessment – To kick off this big UOI we watched Caine’s Arcade….if you haven’t seen it please take the time to have a watch, it’s great! (You can find it on Youtube) We then completed our pre-assessment doc as you can see below…
English – Synthesising : we introduced our new comprehension strategies this week and started off by thinking carefully about what we already know about the Big Business UOI. We will then add to this throughout the week and the unit as we gain new information which will then help us to form our own synthesis’.
Playscripts – This week in class we started to explore our new writing genre of Playscripts. Here we are deconstructing a good playscript, highlighting the features and taking note of the structure….all so we can write our own scripts over the next few weeks.
Mini-market Provocation – what a fun afternoon we had on Wednesday with our mini-market provocation! Each group in Year 5 had $100 (tokens) and 45mins to set up a business stall to sell chocolate coins to their classmates. They had to prepare their stall, think about advertising, consider packaging and purchase stock. What an amazing learning experience! It was also very helpful for us as teachers to find out all the discussions that we need to have with the children on expenses, profit, costings, loss and whether or not their business would be a sustainable venture.
Green Spaghetti Drama – we had lots of fun putting together an advertisement collaboratively to sell Green Spaghetti…..even I wanted to taste it!
Market Research – this week we began some discussion on why and how we conduct market research and also began thinking about what products we might like to sell on our market stall. In our breaks, we headed out into the field and surveyed some of our prospective customers.
Transdisiplinary Theme – How We Organise Ourselves
Central Idea – There are many factors at work within a workplace
- functioning effectively as a team (function)
- how the components in a marketplace operate – (price, budget, profit, loss, supply and demand) (causation)
- research and marketing (reflection)
An inquiry into.
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- the relationship between common fractions and decimal fractions.
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- relationships between fractions, decimals, percentages.
- problems involving ratios and proportion.
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An inquiry into…
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- how tools and procedures can be used to measure accurately
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- how tools and procedures can be used to solve measurement problems
- the connection between measurements and other units of maths (conversion)
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Writing Focus – Playscripts : For the first few weeks of this UOI we will be looking at Playscripts and will spend some time to write our own/groups scripts ready for our advertisements.
A play script is a piece of writing written for the stage.
- A play script will include a list of characters (at the very beginning).
- It may be divided into acts which are then divided into scenes.
- Each scene will have a description of the setting at the start and then the characters’ dialogue.
- Dialogue is set out with the character’s name on the left, then a colon then the dialogue.
- Stage directions for the actors are written every now and again in italics and brackets.
Reading Focus – For this unit, our reading comprehension strategies are Synthesising and Questioning.
Synthesising – It’s best to think of synthesising as an ongoing, multi-step process. We want students to stop multiple times to evaluate what they know or think they know about some element of the text. Elements like the topic, the characters, the problem, etc. Each time students stop reading, they reflect, they combine their previous thoughts with new information and they form new ideas.
Questioning – To aid comprehension, skilful readers ask themselves questions before, during, and after they read. We can help the children become more proficient by modelling this and encouraging them to use it when they read independently.
Successful reading is not simply the mechanical process of “decoding” text. Rather, it is a process of active inquiry. Good readers approach a text with questions and develop new questions as they read, for example:
“What is this story about?”
“What does the main character want?”
“Will she get it?” “If so, how?”
Even after reading, engaged readers still ask questions:
“What is the meaning of what I have read?”
“Why did the author end the paragraph (or chapter, or book) in this way?”
“What was the author’s purpose in writing this?”
5C – Queena Huang
- Read the Weekly Update
- Mathletics – continue with the set tasks or feel free to try any others that you feel you want to practice.
- Prodigy – please continue on with your Prodigy online games.
- 5F – please continue to use Quizlet to help you learn your spelling words and meanings.
- UOI – have a think about some handmade products, food, games or services that you think you might be interested in selling at your Big Business Market…come in on Monday with a list of Top 5 that you can share with your group. Please don’t buy anything yet!!!!
- Spelling – The children are sent home their 10 personal words that they need to learn for the week. The will happen on a Monday for 5F, Wednesday for 5D and Friday for 5C. Please, can a parent (or responsible adult) support the children by...testing them (written or oral), getting them to put their words into interesting sentences (written or oral), discussing the meanings of the words, thinking about synonyms and antonyms of that word, discussing words with a similar meaning etc.
- Reading – The children will be choosing levelled readers based on their own ability and are expected to read each night for at least 20mins at home with a parent. The children need to record their reading in their Reading Journals and parents can you please sign your child’s journal each night? Journals need to be returned to school each morning to be checked and will come home each evening (except Friday). Children may use Big Universe twice a week (only) as their choice of home reading
- Mandarin Home Learning
