Year 3/4 Mainstream

Celebrating Learning

What we’ve been up to:

This fortnight, we celebrated the winter solstice with the Lantern Festival. In the lead up to this event, students created their own lanterns in Art with Antoinette and practised the songs in music with Erica. A huge thank you to all the families who volunteered their time to make this wonderful event for our school community!

Students have continued publishing work samples for their portfolios, which will be shared in our Term Three student-led parent/ caregiver- teacher conferences. These work samples have come from all areas of the classroom curriculum and students are very excited to share their work with parents and caregivers. 

With the closure of part of our school grounds, a reminder to 3-6s to attend lunch time clubs, visit the library, or head to the park for play times. 

Maths

In Mathematics, students have been reviewing their understanding of fractions and moving into the concept of decimals fractions. We have explored the many ways decimal fractions appear in the real world and in other mathematical areas, such as measurement. We will go deeper into learning about decimal tenths, hundredths, the base ten relationship and related patterns.

Some questions that have guided our thinking are:

• As the number of parts increases what happens to the size of the parts?
• What are some common equivalent fractions?
• How many different ways can we see and represent fractions and decimals?
• How can we connect fractions to decimal fractions?
• How are decimals used in the real world?

This unit will be an excellent launch pad as we head into our last week of term and explore the concept of money.

Literacy

In Reading, students continued to develop their skills in the four roles of Reciprocal Reading. Reading groups are starting to work together to assign roles and select sections of texts that they are reading, making connections with and discussing together.

In Writing, students have continued with the Writer’s Workshop, with a focus on editing and publishing. Publishing means creating a final, neat copy of their work, either by carefully handwriting their final draft or using digital tools to publish such as Google Slides or Google Documents. During this process, students focused on checking and correcting their spelling, punctuation, and handwriting to make sure their writing is clear and easy to read. Once published, their final pieces are ready to share with their classmates and families. This process encourages students to take pride in their writing and develop confidence in sharing their ideas.

What’s coming up:

• In Reading, students will continue practicing all of the reciprocal reading roles.
• In Writing, we will continue the Writer’s Workshop process with an emphasis on publishing our writing in creative ways.
• In Mathematics, students will continue exploring decimals to hundredths.
• The school holidays! The last day of Term 2 will be Friday 4th July - finishing at 2.30pm. 

Things families can talk about at home:

• Collecting writing ‘seeds’ to use for writing ideas in Term 3 e.g. tickets, photos, drawings, clippings from magazines or newspapers. 
• Practice place value to hundredths to develop understanding with adding and subtracting tenths and hundredths with this fun game: Pinata Party Hundredths 
• When reading, ask students to summarise the main ideas of what they’ve been reading.
• Encourage students to consider how the author has published their writing. What format is it? What images, colours and fonts are used?