Welcome to 3/4A with Mr Hodge & Ms Vigilanti! 2

We have had a wonderful term in 3/4 learning all about Aboriginal history and comparing our daily lives to Aboriginals thousands of years ago. We have read and written all about daily lives and culture. This week we are comparing a map of what Australia looks like today with a map of the Aboriginal countries many years ago. In our photos you can see that we have attempted to draw our  own maps of Australia from memory, with the borders, states and capital cities all revealed to us after we attempted our own! It was really tricky but a great way to learn and remember our country. We then explored an indigenous map of Australia online and found the country that we live on and others might have visited. We were blown away to learn that Australia is made up of over 250 Aboriginal countries, each with their own language!

In maths, we are exploring multiplication strategies and trying to make, draw and understand how multiplication works. A favourite lesson of the week has been discovering arrays! We were challenged to count a group of counters as efficiently as possible and arrange the counters so everyone else could see how we did it. This got us working in teams, discussing our strategies and trying many different ways. You can see some of our thinking below were we grouped them lots of different ways, including piles, groups and eventually putting them altogether in an array with rows and columns. Using an arrays helps us to see collections as multiplication and will launch a big investigation into a range of multiplication strategies!

Even though we a nearing the end of term, a lot of learning is still happening each day in the 3/4 learning community! 

 Brendan Hodge & Amanda Vigilanti.