Hello everyone! Welcome to a new school year. I am Yuma and will be the grade 5 teacher for this year. I am so excited to experience many new things with all the students!

We started the year by playing ice breaker games to get to know each other better such as introducing our names and talking about our families, 2 truths and a lie, charades, and more. It was a great opportunity for students to find out more about each other, but also to get to know their teacher and new classmate.

Through a student vote, they decided to go climb the big hill/mountain in front of the school. It was quite steep and very tiring, but it was very nice to see caring students helping each other through difficult tracks. We all successfully made it to the very top! The Gojo campus looked extremly small from the top of the mountain!

Grade 5 has started the first unit, which is about life. Our central idea is, learning about the life cycle of living things can help us understand who we are. We started by defining what life cycle is. This gave students more ideas about what they want to learn and the different questions they have to put on their wonderwall. Some questions students had were the following: “What is the life cycle of a plant?”, “What animal has the longest life span?”, and “How do different creatures grow?”.

Our first formative assessment for the unit will be creating an informative life cycle poster of a living thing of their choice. Some people are working in pairs and others are working individually. It is exciting to see their knowledge growing and be able to communicate that with others through a visual poster.

For English, we have been learning about different types of punctuation, using them correctly, and practicing editing/proofreading our own written work. This week, students have completed punctuation questions, planned a summary writing piece and wrote their final summary draft of a book.

Grade 5 students are currently creating art pieces for a Matsumoto art competition. The theme is ‘Sakura’ and the materials students can use are crayons and watercolour paints. They have been going outside to observe the cherry blossoms and get inspired for their artworks!

There are exciting things planned for next week and I can’t wait to share all about it with you!!