Learning with 3/4A

Dear Families,

We hope this newsletter finds you well!

Important Announcements

Home Reading Program: We’re excited to announce that the Home Reading Program will begin in Term 2! This initiative aims to boost your child's confidence in reading aloud with accuracy, fluency, and expression while nurturing a lifelong love of reading. Please email me if you wish for your child to participate.
Library Day: Every Tuesday afternoon is library day! To borrow books from our school library, your child must bring a library bag. This can be a reader bag, canvas bag, plastic folder, or a green bag from home. Using a library bag helps protect the books and teaches valuable organization skills.
Book Borrowing Policy: Students can return and reborrow books every Tuesday. If a library book is not returned or reborrowed within a fortnight, students will be unable to borrow until the book is returned. This policy encourages responsibility and organization in our young readers.
Reading Diary: Each child will receive a reading log to track their reading achievements. This diary includes columns for the date, book title and a rating. It's a great tool for tracking progress and discussing strengths and areas for improvement.

Celebrations from the Week

We have begun our new mentor text, Nim's Island by Wendy Orr. This text will link beautifully with our integrated studies topic, "Our Island Home." Students will create their own islands, drawing upon Nim's experience of living on an island to inspire their creations. They have been learning new vocabulary words within the text and have enjoyed reading the first two chapters.

Additionally, students have been having fun with fractions! They are learning to represent common fractions in collections of objects and within shapes.

3/4B's Reading Gallery Walk - Walking, Talking and Lots of Thinking!

Finding ways to make reading comprehension exciting can sometimes feel like trying to teach a cat to swim; tricky, messy, and not always successful! But in Grade 3/4B, I decided to change things with a Reading Gallery Walk, a fun, movement-filled way to flex our reading muscles while having a lot of laughs and talking.

Our Focus: We based our Gallery Walk on our Term 1 text, Fantastic Mr. Fox. I created 8 different summaries with 2 deep-thinking comprehension questions each. We focused in on skills like inferring meaning, understanding why characters act the way they do, and spotting the hidden messages authors love to sneak in.

The Walk:

Students worked in small groups, rotating around the classroom like detectives at a mystery scene. At each station, they read a short passage and tackled two open-ended questions. Here’s the catch, they had to share the pen which meant that everyone had to have the opportunity to write answers to the questions. The teamwork skills were almost as impressive as the reading skills. The students were encouraged to underline evidence in the text to back up their answers, talk through the tricky parts together, and never answer with just I don't know.

The Gallery: Once all stations were completed, students took a Gallery Walk to admire everyone’s hard work, reflect on common tricky parts in the questions, and share handy tips for future reading success. I was really proud of the conversations I heard throughout the walk.

The Result: Students stayed engaged, worked beautifully as teams, and showed me exactly which reading skills we can move on from and which ones need a little extra TLC this term.

In short: Lots of reading, lots of talking, lots of learning, and not one single complaint about being bored! (Mission accomplished!)

Cooking Up Some Fraction Fun!

On the last day of Term 1, the Grade 3/4B students put their fraction skills to delicious use by making chocolate chip Easter baskets! In true MasterChef style, everyone took turns measuring, pouring, and stirring while putting on their best TV chef voices to explain what they were doing, and why (with some very creative reasonings!).

A huge thank you to Miss Jenni for helping out. Every student headed home with a tasty Easter basket which, thanks to a bit of Easter magic somehow ended up filled with chocolate eggs by the end of the day!

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