Classroom News

Grade 3 & 4

Dear Year 3 and 4 community, 

We have had a wonderful term of learning! We have been so impressed with the settled and calm way in which our 3/4 students have begun and finished off the term! 

Literacy

In Reading, we have been building our independence by selecting our own iPick books, deepening our understanding through sticky notes to track our thinking, and expanding our ideas using text evidence. We have engaged in a variety of reading activities and created Reader Responses to reflect on and analyse what we read.

Our focus has been on non-fiction texts, where we have explored and compared different topics, as well as picture storybooks, which have provided wonderful opportunities to examine themes and characters in depth. One of our favourite activities has been creating Open-minded portraits, allowing us to step into the shoes of characters and understand their perspectives on a deeper level.

To ensure targeted and explicit instruction, we continue to incorporate conferencing and mini-lessons that strengthen our Big 6 reading skills. This balance of independent reading, thoughtful discussion, and structured support is helping us grow into confident and engaged readers!

In Writing, we have each completed a writing survey and have negotiated a suitable goal to improve our writing. As a class, we have focused on both narrative and persuasive writing, examining the structure and key elements of each.

For narrative writing, we explored the importance of an engaging orientation that introduces the setting and characters, a well-structured complication that drives the story forward, and a resolution that provides a satisfying conclusion. We have also considered how to use dialogue, descriptive language, and varied sentence structures to enhance our storytelling.

More recently, we have shifted our focus to persuasive writing, where we have learned to structure our arguments effectively. We are developing strong introductions that clearly state our opinion, body paragraphs that present logical reasons supported by evidence, and conclusions that reinforce our stance. We have also discussed the use of persuasive devices such as rhetorical questions, emotive language, and repetition to strengthen our arguments.

In addition to writing formal persuasive texts, we have also explored advertisements as a form of persuasive writing. We have analysed how companies use slogans, visual imagery, persuasive techniques, and catchy language to influence their audience. We have also experimented with creating our own advertisements to apply these strategies in a fun and engaging way.

 We have also been busily working hard in completing our own fantastic writing pieces to add to our Writer’s Gifts.  The quality of the writing is truly amazing and we are so proud of our wonderful writers! 

Numeracy

In Maths, we started the year by setting up our routines and expectations to help us work confidently and stay on track. A big focus has been on developing a growth mindset, where we learn to take risks, embrace challenges, and believe in our ability to improve.

Our learning has been all about 3D shapes! We explored different shapes around our classroom and identified their features, such as edges, faces, and vertices. We then took on the challenge of drawing 3D objects on isometric paper—this was tricky at first, but many of us showed amazing persistence, and we even discovered some budding architects in our class!

We also explored perspective, learning how the way we look at a shape can change how it appears. This has helped us see and understand 3D shapes in new ways!

Inquiry

We have had so much fun this term creating our video games using Scratch! We have been busy coding and fixing up glitches, getting feedback to improve our game just like game programmers do. We are so proud of our students’ efforts and seeing their wonderful coding skills too. We set out to solve a problem in our lives that was affecting us frequently, decided on a solution to solve our problem and designed a video game to show how we could solve it. We even included in some of our games flying diaries, mazes to collect objects on the way so we wouldn’t forget to pack our things for the day! We definitely learnt how to identify problems in our lives and work out appropriate solutions to solve these. We finished this wonderful unit off by sharing our games with the Grade 2s at a special Grade 3/4 expo!

We are looking forward to seeing some parent helpers in our classrooms next term. Please don’t forget to touch base with your child’s classroom teacher to arrange a time. 

We hope you all have a wonderful Easter break, and return ready for another busy Term 2! 

Kind regards,

Year 3 & 4 Teachers