Year 3/4 Mainstream
Celebrating Learning
It’s almost camp time, with only one week left to go until we head off to Arrabri Lodge in Warburton! Thank you to all the families who came along to our information session on Monday. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to your child’s teacher if you have any further questions about camp!
Grade Three students are continuing to engage in the MALPA Young Doctors program with Mel Harrison and Shara Graham that began in Week 2 of this term. These sessions involve learning about personal health and hygiene with a focus on learning life skills in wellbeing.
Maths:
Our unit on multiplicative thinking has continued, and we have learned a strategy for problems that involve multiplying by 5 - it’s called the Half Ten Strategy, and we can just work out what ten times the number is, then divide it in half! We have also learned about how blank arrays can help us work out problems where there is a two digit number to be multiplied. Even though we continue to make learning our times tables a big focus, the emphasis is on developing efficient strategies rather than rote learning number facts!
What strategies do you use when you think of multiplying? Please encourage your children to practise their facts at home!
Additionally, we have continued to explore data displays and interpret different types of graphs as we have created our own graphs about rainfall and temperature in Melbourne.
Literacy:
In Reading, students are exploring Question Answer Relationships (QAR). Where readers think about the questions that are asked and where they will find the answers to help them understand what we are reading. We’ve examined “Right There” questions when readers can point to the answer right there in the text. We’ve also come up with “Think & Search” questions when readers need to slow down and search for the answers in different places in the text.
In Writing, students have been persisting to write a narrative that’s only 300 words. We’ve been practising our editing skills to try and get our drafts as close as possible to the word limit.
Students are also working on creating presentations about a country in the Southern Hemisphere as part of our Unit Focus - “Great Southern Lands”.
Through their 300-word stories and their country presentations, students have been practising computer skills like using a word count, adding and editing text boxes, and creating additional slides in a presentation. We will continue to build more skills like inserting images and captions and choosing animations and transitions to jazz up presentations.
What’s to come in the next two weeks:
- In Writing, students will continue to create their Great Southern Lands Presentations.
- In Reading, students will continue to practise using question answer relationships to help them understand what they are reading.
- In Maths, we will be developing our understanding of division strategies.
- In Week 8, we will be attending our 3/4 Camp to Arrabri Lodge.
