Grade 3/4 News

Mental Health and Wellbeing

Across the 3/4 classes we have been working on maintaining both our staff and students' mental wellbeing. Our focus has been on catching our negative thinking and reframing our internal monologue.

Some common internal monologue our students have shared with us includes:

"I'll never be able to do this"

"I'm not good at anything"

"My life sucks"

"Nobody wants to be my friend"

"Everyone is mean to me"

It's important to catch our inner critic trying to tell us that these things are true - they definitely are NOT true! It's about retraining our brain and the language we use to talk to ourselves. As adults, we know that this can be extremely challenging. That is why equipping our children with the skills to catch negative thinking before it becomes the story we continually let our inner critic tell is so very important.

The below infographic may support you in having these conversations with your children at home:

Reading

The big focus this term for our reading instruction has been around developing our fluency when reading aloud and tuning into vocabulary to increase our understanding of what we read. Explicit instruction in these elements of reading for our students is the most effective and efficient way of developing the ability necessary to be a confident and skilled reader. Just look at what is needed to be a great reader:

Our students have been developing their reading fluency through a strategy called Fluency Pairs where students take it in turns to read the same passage of text and support/give feedback in a constructive and helpful manner. The goal is not for comprehension or to be reading a text with lots of new vocabulary - the goal is to read accurately at a just-right rate. Once fluency is achieved the brain then has the capacity to focus on comprehension!