Icarus Community Report

Welcome to the Icarus Community for 2022 Grade 3/4 September 2022 Newsletter

With Term 3 coming to an end, we would like to acknowledge all the hard work of students in the Icarus Community. It has been a wonderful term, filled with many highlights, including Book Week and seeing the wonderful costumes students wore for our book week parade. We look forward look forward to an exciting Term 4 ahead!

Reading

Recently, the students in 3/4 Icarus have been focusing on three main comprehension strategies. They are:

SYNTHESISING-Using prior knowledge combined with new knowledge, and collating key information into a summary. 

ANALYSING an author’s craft to understand the text at a deeper level. Students answered questions such as:

• What genre is the text? (e.g.  fantasy, realistic fiction, play, traditional literature, non-fiction). How do you know?
• What did you notice about how the writer uses dialogue or punctuation?
• What did you notice about the language the author used? How did it add to your
  enjoyment or understanding?
• Is the title a good title for the text? Why or why not?
• What is the author’s purpose for writing this text? How do you know? 

SOLVING WORDS-Using a range of strategies to read and understand the meaning of unfamiliar words. This is an important skill because it increases students’ vocabularies. Some of the strategies used are as follows:

• Looking for base or smaller words within a word.
• Rereading sentences to look for extra information to work out the meaning of words.
• Finding the meaning of words in a dictionary and writing a synonym and antonym for the word. 
• Drawing a picture that will remind them of the word meaning. 

Some students have also read online texts, in groups and used Reciprocal Reading techniques to discuss texts. This requires students to make predictions about a text, clarify the meaning of words, ask and answer questions and summarise a text. 

Writing

In Writing, the Icarus community have been learning about Explanation writing. Explanation writing is to explain how something occurs. It sounds obvious, but it’s a little more complicated than it might at first appear. An explanation is normally a response to a question. There are several types of explanation writing, designed to suit different purposes. 

Firstly, students were able to explore several different ecosystems. The ecosystem were deserts, rainforests, grasslands, forests, marine and tundra. They were required to answer the following questions.

1. What is your ecosystem? 
2. Explain and describe how your ecosystem works? Include abiotic and biotic factors. 
3. If something negative happens to your ecosystem, what would be the impact? 
4. Why do different impacts cause different affects in your ecosystem? 

Then, students asked a question about their biome (ecosystem). Students selected an area that they were interested in finding out more information on. This allowed the Icarus students to identify the following: 

• What is your topic and what does it look like? 
• Where is it located and what is the climate like there? 
• What are abiotic and biotic factors? 
• What are the negative and positive human impacts on your ecosystem?

Students were able to present this writing in a booklet and as a poster. Once they selected an area of interest, students completed a 1st draft of their explanation text. After finishing the good copy of writing they were able to complete a publish piece using bookcreator.com, an excellent resource. 

Numeracy

In numeracy, students have been learning about the concepts of fractions and decimals and area and perimeter. 

Fractions and Decimals

This term, students have learnt about fractions and decimals. They have learnt that fractions are equal parts of a whole and when written, a fraction is represented by a numerator and a denominator. Students have also learnt how to find equivalent fractions and were introduced to the fractions wall. Additionally, they have learnt how to place numbers on a number line and represent fractions as decimals. 

Area and Perimeter

Students have also been learning about area and perimeter. Students have learnt how to calculate the distance around a shape (perimeter) using addition and use multiplication to calculate the space inside a shape. 

Take a look at some of the work students have been completing!

Inquiry

In Inquiry, we are learning about different ecosystems/biomes. We learned to identify a biome’s biotic and abiotic factors, and how those factors work together to create a balance. In groups and pairs, we investigated how humans have impacted the biomes positively and negatively. Also, we researched ways to help protecting ecosystems. We worked on dioramas and posters to represent the biomes of our choices. 

SEL

The focus for our SEL sessions this term have been help-seeking behaviours. We distinguished small problems from the serious ones, identified who can help us with our problems and whom we can help when needed. Through role-play, we practised how to ask for help in a respectful and polite manner.  

Friendly Reminders

• Please ensure your child has a water bottle at school each day and that it is labelled with their name. 
   
• Please ensure your child is attending school regularly and on time as ‘It is not okay to be away’. 
   
• Please ensure that your child is reading their home reader for 20 minutes every night and that their reading log is filled in and signed by a parent/guardian.
   
• We strongly encourage students bring along some brain food (fruit and vegetables) that they may eat in class. It is important that this is included as an additional snack in their lunchbox. 

We thank you for your ongoing support this term and wish everyone a safe school holidays! 

The Icarus Community Teachers 🙂