What's Happening in Our 5/6 Classroom?

Wow! What a busy and exciting start to our term. We’ve been working hard to establish our classroom routines, exploring what helps us learn best so that our lessons run smoothly and align with our different learning styles. This has involved lots of discussions, reflections, and some trial and error—but we’re getting there together!

In English, we have begun our novel study on The Silver Donkey by Sonya Hartnett. We've read the first two chapters and have been diving into figurative language, which we’ve also applied to our choral reading passages about our unexpected (and slightly hairy) class pet… David. David isn’t a fluffy rabbit or a cute little guinea pig—he’s a huntsman spider! Yes, you read that right! We’ve (somewhat) lovingly adopted him as our classroom pet, and he has already inspired some wonderful descriptive writing.

Speaking of writing, we’ve also started looking at narrative writing, focusing on using descriptive language to bring our stories to life. You may have heard that I’ve been using AI in the classroom to support our lessons—one of the ways we’ve been using it is to check our descriptive writing. After crafting paragraphs full of imagery, we’ve asked AI to generate a picture based on our descriptions. This has been a fantastic tool for providing immediate feedback on whether students have used enough descriptive language to make their writing as vivid as they imagined.

In Maths, we have launched into our Place Value unit with lots of hands-on group activities. These have encouraged our students to use metacognitive language—talking about how they solve problems, not just recording the answers. It’s been great to see students sharing strategies and learning from each other.

In Geography, we have been discussing diversity and how different cultures and backgrounds come together to form a community. To help us understand this, we explored different metaphors to describe diversity, such as a salad bowl, a mosaic, a melting pot, and a symphony orchestra. Each of these metaphors helped us think about how individual differences contribute to something greater—whether it’s unique ingredients in a salad, different tiles in a mosaic, various instruments in an orchestra, or blended flavours in a melting pot. This discussion has led us to reflect on our own class community and the cultural diversity within Franklin. Your child may have come home with questions about their own heritage, as we begin an inquiry project into our students' cultural backgrounds. If your family has any traditions, stories, or experiences you’d like to share, we would love to hear them!

We are so proud of how engaged and enthusiastic the students have been in their learning so far. We can’t wait to see where our inquiries, discussions, and David’s adventures take us next!

Warmly,

Mel Cherry