Year 5 Update Week 7
Monday 30th September – School closed (CPD)
Tuesday 1st October – National Day (School closed)
Wednesday 2nd October – Parent Teacher Consultations
Friday 4th October – Half Term Break – School finishes at 3pm
ISA Assessments
The students have worked really hard this week completing all of the ISA assessments. Please read the information below which will give you an overview of the assessments and their purpose.
About the ISA
The ISA is designed specifically for students in Grades 3–10 in international schools and schools with an international focus, whose language of instruction is English.
Schools use the ISA because:
- it is not specific to a single curriculum;
- it tests-core skills in mathematical literacy, reading and writing;
- the test material is eclectic, drawing on many cultural and national sources;
- the assessments are designed with the knowledge that more than half of the test takers have first languages other than English;
- it includes writing tasks and open-ended questions to better illuminate students’ thinking processes;
- it provides diagnostic information that can be used at the school, class, or individual level;
- performance on the ISA can be related to international benchmarks;
- they can evaluate the reliability of their internal assessments and confirm that they are aligned with international expectations of performance;
- scaled ISA scores enable monitoring of student performance over time; and
- it enables comparison of the results of their Grade 8 ,9 and 10 students with the PISA results for each country that participated in the latest PISA administration.
The ISA improves learning by:
- measuring individual students’ achievement in order to reflect on and address strengths and weaknesses;
- monitoring an individual’s or group’s progress over time;
- evaluating instructional programs against objective evidence of student performance, to diagnose gaps, and to measure growth in learning between grade levels and from year to year within one grade level;
- comparing subgroup performance (for example, girls and boys; students from different language backgrounds) to see where there may be unexpected results and try to understand them; and
- providing normative data in relation to selected populations to ‘see how we are doing’.
Home Learning – Migration
We have been really impressed with the learning students have been doing at home. Through interviews, movies, animation, posters and slide shows they have shared some amazing stories from family and friends about their inspiring migration journeys.
Music – Mr Gibson
Central Idea
Migration has an impact on people and society.
Lines of Inquiry
- The reasons why people migrate (causation)
- The challenges and opportunities of migration (change)
- The impact of migration on individuals and society (perspective)
We have been exploring the different types of migration through personal stories and inquiries into different case studies.
Solo Taxonomy – Mr Pheasant
SOLO Taxonomy is a powerful model of learning that is both easy to use and highly effective in advancing and deepening learning across the curriculum.
Central Idea
Strategies for whole number computation can apply to fractional and decimal computation.
An inquiry into…
- efficient mental strategies that can be used to solve addition and subtraction of decimal fractions
- efficient written strategies that can be used to solve addition and subtraction decimal fractions
Here are some links to help you!
Central Idea
Manipulation of shape and space takes place for a particular purpose.
- creating, describing and visualising 2D and 3D shapes
- transforming shapes
- locating points on a grid
We are continuing to make sense of what we read by applying our self-monitoring strategies. We are trying to do this when reading in the classroom from book stacks or class libraries, selecting books from the learning centre as well as researching online.
We have listened to and watched a variety of author interviews and tried to note down the important tips they shared with us about the process of writing and what helps them be the best writer they can be. We will try to use these tips and apply them to our own writing next week, focussing on adding details to engage the reader.
5H: Shaun Ho
5W: Carlson Lam
5Y: Winsley Dai
House Points
- Read the Weekly Update
- Mathletics – continue with the set tasks
- Spelling – each week the children are sent home their 10 personal words that they need to learn for the week. 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 – levelled home readers will be starting to come home soon. 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– All children are encouraged to take a reading book home on the days when they have Mandarin lessons.
Thought of the week
