Australian Curriculum Overview
English
In Years 5 and 6, students communicate with peers and teachers from other classes and schools, community members, and individuals and groups, in a range of face-to-face and online/virtual environments. Students engage with a variety of texts for enjoyment. They 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.
Mathematics
Understanding includes making connections between representations of numbers, using fractions to represent probabilities, comparing and ordering fractions and decimals and representing them in various ways, describing transformations and identifying line and rotational symmetry. Fluency includes choosing appropriate units of measurement for calculation of perimeter and area, using estimation to check the reasonableness of answers to calculations and using instruments to measure angles. Problem Solving includes formulating and solving authentic problems using whole numbers and measurements and creating financial plans. Reasoning includes investigating strategies to perform calculations efficiently, continuing patterns involving fractions and decimals, interpreting results of chance experiments, posing appropriate questions for data investigations and interpreting data sets.
Science
Over Years 3 to 6, students develop their understanding of a range of systems operating at different time and geographic scales. In Year 5, students are introduced to cause and effect relationships that relate to form and function through an exploration of adaptations of living things. They explore observable phenomena associated with light and begin to appreciate that phenomena have sets of characteristic behaviours. They broaden their classification of matter to include gases and begin to see how matter structures the world around them. Students consider Earth as a component within a solar system and use models for investigating systems at astronomical scales. Students begin to identify stable and dynamic aspects of systems, and learn how to look for patterns and relationships between components of systems. They develop explanations for the patterns they observe.
History
The Year 5 curriculum provides a study of colonial Australia in the 1800s. Students look at the founding of British colonies and the development of a colony. They learn about what life was like for different groups of people in the colonial period. They examine significant events and people, political and economic developments, social structures, and settlement patterns.