What's the score, with Year Three and Four!
We have only freshly started this term at St Anthony's, but we have already jumped into fresh units of work that have seen our students sharing their ideas and engaging with these interesting new concepts. Have a read through to see what we have been up to!
Reading in Media Art
As with past terms, we aim for our morning reading sessions to fit in neatly with our terms overarching concept. This term we are focusing on Media Arts which means students will be reading about many different forms of art including movies, documentaries, animation, graffiti, website design, video games and more! We however have started off by reading about Advertisement! We understand this is a persuasive form of Media Art which aims for people to spend their money or time on a particular product or service. Please enjoy an advertisement we had a laugh at in class below!
We have also learnt that there are various strategies that can be used in an advertisement, such as using star power like a celebrity, quoting facts and figures and using emotive language, all to make a product look really good! One key strategy we focused on in class was omission. We know that companies are not meant to tell lies in their commercial, but they can chose to not discuss some of the less favourable things about their product!
In class we practiced this by designing drinks of our own. One drink was very healthy for you but tasted awful! The other drink tasted super yummy but was full of ingredients that were not the best. Not that we spoke about these facts in our descriptions!
Writing and Editing
A key skill that has been identified in our year level is the editing of our written work. We understand that we rarely write things down perfectly the first time, we are often thinking about so many different things at once! We understand that rereading and making editing choices on our writing lets us form the best version of our work.
We have done this by practicing reviewing a few sentences like the ones below. These sentences aim to express an idea, but may need some words changed or added to clarify what the writer means. How would you fix the sentences below?
As well as this we have had a strong focus on proper and common nouns that may be found in our writing. We are growing to understand that a common noun is a general word for a person, place or thing, that does not need a capital letter when we write it down. Words such as city, student or hamburger. A proper noun is the specific title of a person place or thing, meaning it does need a capital letter when we write it! Words such as New York, Dustin Martin or Big Mac.
We have practiced identifying different examples of proper and common nouns and are looking to more consistently write these with the correct use of capitals in our writing.
Multiplication and Division
We have begun this term looking at two of the four operations, multiplication and division. We understand that these two concepts can work together and be modelled in different ways.
We have worked through different strategies such as vertical, arrays and split strategy to solve different examples of sums involving multiplication. We have also focused on working through our times tables. We understand we don't need to memorise every single times table there is, but having them in our memory can help us solve multiplication sums more effectively mentally.
For example 12 x 15 might look like a really tricky sum on the surface, but if I know that 12 x 12 is 144 and that 12 x 3 is 36, I can add these together and reach my final answer of 180 without too much worry!
I am strong!
Finally this term we will be learning a great deal in our Social and Emotional Learning sessions, particularly about safety, our support network and choices through the Daniel Morcombe Foundation learning program.
We have started the term off by thinking about our Personal Strengths. We know that everyone has different strengths, this is what makes us unique and special! Strengths can make things better for people around us and every student in Year Three and Four has strengths that make our classrooms such wonderful places to be. Strengths like a positive attitude, listening to others, being good at remembering things and much more! It was such a nice way to start the term by reflecting on what we do well!
This is just a taste of all the exciting things happening in our classrooms at the moment. We have plenty more awesome activities, excursions, incursions and more to come!
Thank you for reading and we appreciate all of your support!
The Year Three and Four Team
Taylor Butler, Tim O'Mahoney, Emma Clausen and Luisa Henderson.