Is your child starting Year 5 soon?
If you’re wondering about what to expect and what your child will learn in Year 5, you’ve clicked on the right article!
We’ll take you through some of the main things to expect in Year 5 and help you unpack the curriculum, important learning areas, NAPLAN, and more.
Let’s get started!
The Year 5 Australian Curriculum: What to Expect When Entering Stage 3
Year 5 English
Year 5 Maths
Science
Other Subjects Studied in Year 5
Year 5 NAPLAN
The Year 5 Australian Curriculum: What to Expect When Entering Stage 3
Starting Year 5 means your child is entering Stage 3, which is the final stage of primary school! During these final years of primary school your child may have a lot of academic and co-curricular responsibilities, such as NAPLAN and Selective School tests, public speaking, debating, sport, or leadership.
Of course, this means starting Year 5 can feel both exciting and a little stressful with a lot of different things to look out for!
Here are some of the important activities, events, and responsibilities you might need to think about in Year 5:
- Year 5 NAPLAN
- Selective School Test
- Preparing for high school
- Co-curricular/Extracurricular Activities
Students starting Stage 3 will also become more independent with their learning and cover more complex content in class.
Year 5 NAPLAN tutoring can help your child feel confident walking into NAPLAN and other exams!
The Australian Curriculum aims to support all students in Year 5 and 6 as they “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; they make informed decisions and act responsibly”.
As your child starts and progresses through Year 5, they will develop into:
- Successful learners
- Confident and creative individuals
- Active and informed young people who are ready to take their place in society.
Year 5 English
Now that we know what to expect when starting Stage 3 of the Australian Curriculum overall, let’s take a closer look at the subjects studied in Year 5!
The Year 5 English curriculum is designed based on three main learning areas:
- Language
- Literature
- Literacy
Together, these three areas work to develop students’ skills in listening, reading, viewing, speaking, writing and creating.
Language
The language component primarily focusses on understanding language structures, forms, and purposes. It covers a range of material including how language changes over time and how language is used to interact in different social contexts to express and understand multiple points of view.
It also teaches students how text structure, organisation, and grammar features such as sentence starters, apostrophes, and headings can signal purpose and formality.
The curriculum also requires students to develop skills including improving their vocabulary, understanding complex sentences, and enhancing word knowledge by learning about suffixes and prefixes, the use of phonic knowledge, difficult plurals, and more.
You can download our Year 5 Spelling Words Worksheets here!
Literature
The second part of the curriculum is about literature and how children understand, respond to, create, and examine literature.
They will learn how to express a point of view and use metalanguage in response to literary texts, understand different literary devices such as similes or metaphors, and create literary texts that experiment with structures, realistic and fantasy settings and characters, and stylistic features.
To introduce your child to some of the best literature for Year 5 students, you can take a look at our Year 5 Recommended Reading List here!
Literacy
The final component, literacy, will help your child learn about identifying texts in context, interacting with others, analysing texts to understand the purpose of a text, and putting it into practice by creating texts for different audiences and purposes.
All three areas are integrated in Year 5 English and by the end of the year, your child will have developed a range of skills and achieved milestones in relation to listening, reading, viewing, speaking, writing, and creating.
Looking for a further breakdown of the Year 5 English Curriculum? Check out our Ultimate Guide to Year 5 English!
Year 5 Maths
The Year 5 Maths curriculum is also based on three content areas:
- Number and Algebra
- Measurement and Geometry
- Statistics and Probability
These strands aim to develop your child’s mathematical knowledge and proficiency including understanding, fluency, problem-solving and reasoning.
Number and Algebra
With Number and Algebra areas, children will learn how to use numbers, especially fractions and decimals, to solve problems and apply them to simple financial maths. They will master a range of skills including division, multiplication, rounding decimals, mental and written problem solving strategies, fractions, and more.
Measurement and Geometry
The Measurement and Geometry component is all about understanding shapes, their location and transformation, related units of measurement, and relevant geometric reasoning. Students will learn skills including how to calculate perimeter and area, choose correct units of measurement, work with three-dimensional and two-dimensional shapes, and learn to use a protractor.
Statistics and Probability
The third area, Statistics and Probability, is primarily about representing and interpreting data. It helps students build their knowledge in relation to understanding and collecting numerical or categorical data, constructing graphs, plots or tables with and without digital technologies, and interpreting different data sets.
Children will also learn chance, understand that probabilities range from 0 to 1, and learn to list outcomes from chance experiments and represent them as fractions.
If you’re looking for some resources to help your child practise their Year 5 Maths, you can take a look at our Year 5 NAPLAN Numeracy Practice tests here!
Science
Just like English and Maths, you can expect Year 5 Science content to cover three main areas! These are:
- Science Understanding
- Science as a Human Endeavour
- Science Inquiry Skills
Science Understanding content ensures children have scientific knowledge and understanding across areas of biological, chemical, physical, and Earth and space sciences. From learning about the adaptations of living things and the properties of solids, liquids and gases to learning about the solar system and how light can be absorbed, reflected and refracted, you can expect your child to cover foundational scientific knowledge in Year 5 science!
The second area, Science as a Human Endeavour, looks at the nature of science and the historical and cultural contributions that impacted its development. Your child will also get a chance to explore how science can be used to solve problems and influence community decisions.
Science Inquiry Skills aim to develop a range of skills in relation to experimentation and investigation including making predictions, planning experiments, using equipment, minimising risks, and recording, processing and analysing data to develop explanations.
Other Subjects Studied in Year 5
In Year 5, your child will study a range of subjects in addition to English, Maths and Science. These will be the same subjects they studied in Year 4, but the content will be a bit more challenging and complex!
Here are all the other subjects they can expect to study in Year 5:
- Human Society and its Environment (HSIE)
- Health and Physical Education (PDHPE)
- Arts
- Technology
- Languages (depending on school)
What to Expect in the Year 5 NAPLAN
In addition to the Year 5 school curriculum, an important part of Year 5 are the NAPLAN assessments. NAPLAN is a set if tests that focus on how well students in Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 can perform basic skills that are important for everyday life.
Let’s take a look at what you can expect from Year 5 NAPLAN exams!
NAPLAN requires your child to sit three separate exams:
- Reading & Writing
- Language Conventions
- Numeracy
Depending on your school, the NAPLAN exams will either be in traditional paper format or online. You can find out more about online NAPLAN exams here!
Reading and Writing
The reading section of the exam requires your child to engage with a range of different texts and answer questions that assess their ability to connect different ideas and identify information including the main idea, purpose of the text, cause and effect, and nature of characters. These texts will be more complex than the Year 3 NAPLAN assessment and will introduce your child to new vocabulary and complex sentence structures.
The first exam will also include a writing section, which requires students to respond to a stimulus like this:
They might be asked to write either a narrative piece, or persuasive piece and the marking criteria will be slightly different depending on the style of writing.
For example, narrative writing criteria will place a greater emphasis on components such as characters, setting, and plot while persuasive writing focuses more on the selection of arguments, persuasive devices, and the capacity to convince and persuade the reader.
Language Conventions
The language conventions exam will assess your child’s spelling, grammar and punctuation skills. The questions in this section expect students to identify and correct spelling errors including frequently used one-syllable words and high-frequency two-syllable words.
They will also be tested on their ability to use conjunctions, verb forms, and punctuation such as speech marks, capital letters and question marks.
So that’s the literacy part of the exam over, the final exam is all about numeracy!
Numeracy
In this section students will be given a series of multiple choice and short response questions, which are all set at a Year 5 skill level. These will assess your child’s skills in relation to the three content areas for Year 5 Maths, which we looked at earlier:
- Numbers and Algebra
- Measurement and Geometry
- Statistics and Probability
So that’s everything you can expect with Year 5 NAPLAN! If you’re looking for more information to help you navigate NAPLAN, take a look at our Guide To The Year 5 NAPLAN For Parents here!
How do you prepare for the exams?
At this stage you might be wondering how you can prepare for the NAPLAN exams. Well, we’ve got you covered! We would recommend going through some practice NAPLAN papers with your child so that they know what to expect on the day of their exams.
To help you find practice tests, we’ve compiled a List of NAPLAN Practice Tests!
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that extensive and strenuous studying is not required for Year 5 NAPLAN assessments. In fact, the National Assessment Program (NAP) advises that no preparation is necessary for NAPLAN tests.
So there you have it!
We’ve unpacked some of the key Year 5 subject areas and assessments so that you know exactly what to expect when your child starts Year 5.
This way you’ll be prepared to support them and their development both inside and outside the school environment!
Looking for some extra help for your child in Year 5?
We have an incredible team of tutors and mentors!
We offer tutoring and mentoring for students in Years K-12 in a variety of subjects, with personalised lessons conducted one-on-one in your home, online or at one of our state of the art campuses in Hornsby or the Hills!
We’ve supported over 8,000 students over the last 11 years, and on average our students score mark improvements of over 20%!
Nervous about the step up to Year 5? We offer tutoring support in the Brisbane area, tutoring help in Bondi Junction, and across Australia!
To find out more and get started with an inspirational tutor and mentor, get in touch today or give us a ring on 1300 267 888!
Maitreyi Kulkarni is a Content Writer at Art of Smart Education and is currently studying a Bachelor of Media and Communications (Public Relations and Social Media) at Macquarie University. She loves writing just about anything from articles to poetry, and has also had one of her articles published with the ABC. When she’s not writing up a storm, she can be found reading, bingeing sitcoms, or playing the guitar.
