Middle Years Learning Community

Middle Years - Term 4 - Weeks 7 & 8

Years 3 & 4 

In Literacy, continuing to explore our focus text ‘The One and Only Ivan’. The students are focusing on persuasive letters, the features and structure of these pieces before having an attempt of drafting up their own letters to persuade the audience. During spelling and grammar lessons, we have been focusing on the letter ‘a’ making the ‘o’ sound with words such as wash, wander and warrior.

In Maths, we have finalised our topic of ‘Probability’ looking at chance experiments and related vocabulary. For the next 3 weeks we are focusing on Multiplication and Division for a third time this year. This week has been focusing closely on worded problems, powers of 10 and multiples of 10.

In Religion, we are continuing our topic of Christmas - Jesse Tree. Students are exploring stories of Abraham and Isaac as key figures in Jesus’ family line. Students will get creative to relate these messages in arts and crafts based activities like creating Christmas Trees with Baubles and other decorations.

In Inquiry, we have continued to work through our topic, ‘What makes Australia unique’? By exploring Anzac Day and the country's flag history. Students have also entered discussions about their own culture/countries and compared similarities and differences to Australia. Students are creating an infographic/brochure to complete their learning in project form.

At home you can reinforce learning by: 

• Reading independently for 20 minutes each night.
• Practicing multiplication tables using flashcards.
• Practicing neat, joined handwriting using horizontal joins between the letters  
• Investigate words with the letter ‘a’ making the ‘o’ sound such as ‘warrior’

At home some worksheets and questions to explore are: 

Multiplication Work – Grade 3/4

1. Identifying the operation (multiplication or division)

Question: Lily has 4 bags with 6 apples in each bag. Which operation will help you find how many apples she has in total — multiplication or division?

2. Multiplying and dividing by powers of 10

Question: What is 30 × 10?

3. Multiplying and dividing by multiples of 10

Question: A shop orders 5 boxes of pencils, and each box has 20 pencils. How many pencils are there altogether?

4. Four-digit by one-digit multiplication with materials (no regrouping)

Question: Use place-value blocks to solve: 3,244 × 2 = ?

5. Distributive property of multiplication

Question: Use the distributive property to solve: 6 × 14 = (6 × 10) + (6 × 4). What is the answer?

6. Multiplying by one-digit numbers with a vertical algorithm (expanded form)

Question: Solve using expanded form:

 243

x   3

7. Dividing by one-digit numbers with arrays

Question: Draw an array to solve: 24 ÷ 3 = ?

8. Dividing by one-digit numbers (no regrouping)

Question: What is 56 ÷ 7?