Grade 3 News
Important Reminders
Grade 3 Team,
Mrs Stokol, Miss Du Vallon, Mrs Alexander, Mrs Huxley and Mrs Rosewarne
Homework 👍 Mathletics and reading. For those wishing to practise their Maths Masters skills, we have linked the belts with some online games. Your child should be able to tell you what belt they are practising All master belts
Learning in Action
Literacy:
Literacy
To begin this term students have begun their unit on poetry. Students have been reading Creation stories, brainstorming interesting words and vocabulary, and utilising this language to construct free verse poems. Students have also explored personal connections and experiences they have had through reading free verse poems. Students are continuing to work on their grammar and have been focusing on the use of pronouns and possessive apostrophes within sentences and applying these skills to their writing pieces.
Preview
Over the next fortnight, students will begin to look at Cinquain and Haiku poems. They will identify and explore symbols within poems and creative writing texts and explain the significance and meaning of symbols. Students will learn about how the author’s meaning is conveyed through the use of images, colours and words in poetry.
Maths:
Students have begun the term by completing a time unit of learning. They engaged in reading and writing analogue and digital times, being challenged to tell time to the quarter and the minute. Students also explored duration of time, by considering how long familiar events take (e.g. seconds, minutes, hours etc.). After 5 explicit lessons, students have begun an investigation to apply their understanding of time. This week we have begun our multiplication unit, with students receiving individual goals to work towards. During our whole class learning time, students explored creating arrays and cherry models to represent multiplication.
Preview
Over the next fortnight, students will continue working on their multiplication goals, with whole class learning focusing on the connection between times tables, e.g. the 10x table is double the 5x table. During problem-solving, students will practise breaking down a problem into more achievable steps to enable them to solve the initial problem.
Inquiry:
This term, students are learning about Australian history. We explored the timeline of Australia up to colonisation and learnt that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people date back over 66,000 years. We looked at a map of Australia from 65,000 years ago, and how Tasmania and the Islands used to be connected to the mainland. Students then learnt about ‘Mungo Man’ and ‘Mungo Lady’, and how they are some of the oldest examples of human remains found in the world.
Students also looked at different Aboriginal language groups and the importance of language to their culture. Students created a card for someone, including the local Wurundjeri word for welcome: “wominjeka.”
Preview
Moving forward, students will continue to explore the importance of the Dreaming to Aboriginal culture. They will be learning about the morals and meanings of these stories, and then writing their own short stories with a moral. Students will also be exploring the idea of totems and selecting their own totems.
Wellbeing:
We have been talking about strong emotions, such as fear and anger, how we respond to these emotions and strategies we can use to help calm ourselves down. Students shared the calming techniques that work for them, and then created their own ‘Calm Down Sandwich’, with each piece of the sandwich representing and reminding them of one of their calm down strategies. Some strategies included:
- Five finger breathing
- Going for a walk
- Laying on our bed
- Playing with our pet
- Listening to music
Students also shared their ideas through the collaborative learning of ‘Give one, get one’ activity, about experiences or events that evoke feelings of anger. They then illustrated the degree of anger on a thermometer from - not much to extremely strong.
Preview We will continue to explore and discuss strong emotions and how to ‘read’ the body language of our friends.