Term 2

Welcome back parents and students, I hope you all had a great holiday. We have a LOT of work ahead of us this term in Year 5 plus many school activities.

At the end of last term we finished off with a great morning of poetry, Glögg and Jul must. It is always great to see the results of weeks of hard work by the students and the thrill that they get from performing in front of friends and family. We almost finished presenting our assignments on migration in the last days of term, I think we still have about two or three people who went on holidays early need to present theirs. I have been pleasantly surprised with the high quality of work and presentations from the students. After The last few have presented I'll mark and return them as quick as possible. In reading, the class had a fun time doing an assessment task on a book that they have read recently. Some of the students got a bit carried away and ran out of time to finish theirs completely. 

In Maths we have had to carry over our unit of mathematics on Fractions into term 2, we will continue to work on fractions until the end of this week and have an assessment on the unit next Monday (16.01.12). We will also have a half year assessment next Friday (20.1.12) and all of next week (and homework) during maths will be spent reviewing and revising work that we have done over term 1.

In Language over the next four and a half weeks we will be combining two of our units it one large one. The class will be looking at Story structure, focusing on plot and character development as well as Chapter story writing. In reading we are starting a new reading programme that will mostly be done in the students free time. Most of you would already know about Raz Kids, if you don't please take five minutes to sit down with your child (you need them to log in) and have a look at the website. I have asked the students that they need to read at least one or two of the Raz Kids books + quiz each week.

In POI (Programme Of Inquiry) our new unit of Inquiry is under the organizing theme of How We Express Ourselves and the central idea is; 

Our appreciation of things depends on their form and function

The lines of inquiry are: 
• Beauty is subjective 
• How things function influences their appearance and vice versa 
• There is a process of design when creating a product 

We will work closely together with the specialists on this unit, and are in the process of booking a visit to the Röhsska museum. As always, if anyone has special competence or skills in this area, you are very welcome to come in and talk to the students, or if you have any connections that could help us, please let me know! 

This POI unit will be relatively short as it needs to finish by the sport holiday (week 7) as we will be starting our work on the Exhibition after the break. Because of all the specialist subject teachers taking on such a large role in this POI the students will get just as much exposure to the POI concept. Between now and week 7 we will also start to look at our Exhibition topic so that after the Sport break we'll hit the ground running. At the moment we are trying to book a better date for the actual Exhibition night so I don't have a date to give you yet. 

Some of the school activities this term include; ice skating, Spring show, Sports day and of course the Exhibition. All the dates, besides Exhibition night, should be on the school calendar which you can find in the right hand side of the blog or on the ISGR website. I will write more about the coming events and an outline of what we will be doing in Language and Maths up to the end of the year next week. I am also in the process of making a few short slide shows to put on the blog of some of the things that we did before Christmas.