Curriculum Overview
In Year 5, students develop an ability to take positive actions for their wellbeing; they relate to others and communicate well with others. They ask challenging questions and seek answers. Students make informed decisions and act responsibly.
Year 5 students explore the following subjects/topics:
- English: Students will engage with a variety of texts for enjoyment. They will listen to, read, view, interpret and evaluate spoken, written and multimodal texts in which the primary purpose is aesthetic, as well as texts designed to inform and persuade. These include various types of media texts including newspapers, film and digital texts, junior and early adolescent novels, poetry, non-fiction and dramatic performances. Students will communicate with peers and teachers from other classes, community members, and individuals and groups, in a range of face-to-face and online/virtual environments.
- Mathematics: Students will make connections between representations of numbers, use fractions to represent probabilities, compare and order fractions and decimals and represent them in various ways. They will describe transformations and identify line and rotational symmetry. Students will choose appropriate units of measurement for calculation of perimeter and area, use estimation to check the reasonableness of answers and use instruments to measure angles. They will formulate and solve authentic problems using whole numbers and measurements and create financial plans. Students will investigate strategies to perform calculations efficiently, continue number patterns involving fractions and decimals, interpret results of chance experiments, pose appropriate questions for data investigations and interpret data sets.
- Science: Students will be introduced to cause and effect relationships through exploration of adaptations of living things and how this links to form and function. They will explore observable phenomena associated with light and begin to appreciate that phenomena have sets of characteristic behaviours. Students will broaden their classification of matter to include gases and begin to see how matter structures the world around them. They will consider Earth as a component within a solar system and use models for investigating systems at astronomical scales. Students will begin to identify stable and dynamic aspects of systems, and learn how to look for patterns and relationships between components of systems. They will develop explanations for the patterns they observe.
- HASS: Students will explore colonial Australia in the 1800s and the social, economic, political and environmental causes and effects of Australia's development, and on the relationship between humans and their environment. Students' geographical knowledge of Australia and the world is expanded as they explore the continents of Europe and North America, and study Australia's colonisation, migration and democracy in the 1800s. They will investigate how the characteristics of environments are influenced by humans in different times and places, as they seek resources, settle in new places and manage the spaces within them. Students will also investigate how environments influence the characteristics of places where humans live and human activity in those places. They will explore how communities, past and present, have worked together based on shared beliefs and values. The Year 5 HASS curriculum introduces studies about Australia's democratic values, its electoral system and law enforcement. In studying human desire and need for resources, students will make connections to economics and business concepts around decisions and choices, gaining opportunities to consider their own and others' financial, economic, environmental and social responsibilities and decision-making, past, present and future.
- Technologies: Students will engage with ideas beyond the familiar, exploring how design and technologies and the people working in a range of technologies contexts contribute to society. They will seek to explore innovation and establish their own design capabilities. Students will be given new opportunities for clarifying their thinking, creativity, analysis, problem-solving and decision-making. They will explore trends and data to imagine what the future will be like and suggest design decisions that contribute positively to preferred futures. Students will develop an understanding of the role individual components of digital systems play in the processing and representation of data. They will acquire, validate, interpret, track and manage various types of data and are introduced to the concept of data states in digital systems and how data are transferred between systems. Students will learn to further develop abstractions by identifying common elements across similar problems and systems and develop an understanding of the relationship between models and the real-world systems they represent.
Term Overviews
For more information about Year 5: