Camp Adventures

The past two weeks have been full of adventure, challenges, and a few unexpected twists for our Year 5/6 class. Our time at camp was packed with leadership opportunities, teamwork, fun, and plenty of silliness. It was fantastic to see every student step up — whether it was tackling the abseiling wall, trying something new, or supporting a classmate. The courage and cooperation on display made us all very proud.

Camp Food Highlights

• "I’d go back just for the pizza on the first night!"
• "The spaghetti bolognese was so good I went back for seconds… maybe thirds!"
• "Best camp ever — the food tasted better than home!"

The Week 6 Bug

Unfortunately, camp memories weren’t the only thing that came home with us… a nasty bug swept through the class this week, and at one point we had only 11 students in attendance. While it hasn’t been ideal, we made the best of it by focusing on revision and consolidating our learning. Hopefully, we’ll all be back on deck (and germ-free!) very soon.

Jumping Jacks Performance

A huge highlight of this week was a special visit from the Jumping Jacks skipping team from Illawarra Primary. The girls wowed us with their incredible rope tricks, teamwork, and athletic ability. Our students were amazed and inspired — some even came away determined to practise their own skipping skills at recess and lunch.

Book Week

Some of our Year 5/6s felt a little too old to dress up, but congratulations to those who did — you looked fantastic! We marked the week with a Harry Potter spell trivia challenge, with great support from Ryan’s wizarding knowledge, which was a fun way to celebrate together.

Learning Update

With so many students away this week, I chose to press pause on our new Math unit and novel study so that everyone can learn these important concepts together. This way, no one misses out on the shared experience, and I won’t need to reteach the same lessons to two different groups. Once we’re back to full strength, we’ll pick up where we left off and continue our learning journey as a whole class.

This week we focused on revising the four operations — addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division — as well as the dreaded fractions, decimals, and percentages, which many of the students were very relieved to finish.

Next week, we’ll be starting Length, Mass, and Conversions. Students will use their Word Origins knowledge of morphemes such as milli (thousandth), centi (hundredth), deci (tenth), and kilo (thousand) to support their understanding of metric measurement. We’ll be exploring how to:

• measure and estimate using metres, centimetres, millimetres, kilograms, and grams
• convert between different units (like metres to centimetres or kilograms to grams)
• apply this to real-world problems such as measuring distances, reading maps, comparing weights, and scaling recipes.

As one student said after spotting the new measurement resources on the floor: "Yes! Fractions are over — bring on measuring stuff instead!"

Looking Ahead

Fingers crossed for a healthy, full class in Week 7 so we can dive back into our new units with everyone on board. In the meantime, please continue to encourage plenty of rest, water, and handwashing at home – we’ve had enough excitement with this bug to last us the term.