Year 3 - Middle Unit

In Reading, we have been learning to read a variety of genres and identify the author’s purpose: to inform, to entertain or to persuade. We have been analysing how our favourite authors like David Walliams and Oliver Jeffers entertain the reader with their fascinating characters, exciting plots and emotive vocabulary that make us feel a certain emotion. We have also been analysing how the author hooks a reader and explains their point of view in persuasive texts.

Students have been practising the pre-writing and drafting phase of the writing process to write a persuasive piece that expresses their opinions and convince their target audience to take action on an issue they are passionate about. Students are learning how to include ‘voice’ in their writing by establishing a tone through selecting striking words and phrases. We take pride in our work and enjoy sharing our thoughts and ideas with our classmates in the ‘Authors Chair’. This week we are spotlighting the use of capital letters when we start a new sentence, include proper nouns and titles. 

We have been learning to describe the likelihood of events using Probability! We have been classifying events using the language certain, impossible, even chance, likely and unlikely and placing them on a probability scale. It has been so much fun playing games, predicting the likelihood of an outcome, and then recording and discussing our results.

During Inquiry, we are finding out how different surfaces can affect the motion of a ball. We have learnt a new word to add to our vocabulary to explain our findings…..FRICTION. We all predicted what would happen when we use force to roll a ball on different surfaces. We spent the afternoon conducting trials on smooth, rough and bumpy surfaces and observing how far a ball would travel. We recorded our observations and then discussed how we noticed our gold balls travelling further on smooth surfaces that had less friction. 

Year 3 Teachers

Ashleigh Dodds (3AD), Mark Condon (3MC)/Juliet Smith, Sally Quinn (3SQ)