Year 3 Term 2 Newsletter

Meet the teaching team

3A - Kate Burman (PLC Leader)

3B - Emma Cecil (alternate Mondays, Tuesday, Wednesday)

      - Lauren Harris (alternate Mondays, Thursday, Friday)

3C - Bec Taylor

Welcome to Term 2

Welcome to Year 3 and 2026!

We were excited to see everyone back to school with lots of stories about their holidays. Everyone has returned rested and ready to learn.

 Specialist Timetable

Important Dates

12/05: Special Food Day

18/05: Curriculum Day 

18/05: Learning Progress meetings (1:00-3:30)

21/05: Learning Progress meetings (1:30-3:30)

03/06: Living Culture Indigenous incursion

08/06: King's Birthday Public Holiday

19/06: Reports Published to families 

26/06: Last Day of Term - 2:30 dismissal

Electronic Rolls

Our electronic rolls are legal documents therefore we must be accountable for any absences. Please assist with this by informing the school by replying to the text message sent by Compass in the event of your child being away.

Teaching and Learning

English

Reading

Students are encouraged to choose books that are a good fit for them and to develop a daily reading habit. This term, they will continue to consolidate their knowledge of the sound (phonemes) made by less common combinations of letters (graphemes), e.g. the [er] sound made by the letters <ir> as in dirt,  <er> in herb, <ur> in surf, <or> in work and <ear> as in earth. Students will also recognise and know how to write homophones, e.g. flour and flower and use them in the correct context in sentences. They will also explore word families and how words or parts of words are related in spelling and meaning. Students will apply this knowledge to reading and spelling to more complex and technical words. In our fluency reads, students are exposed to new language to expand their vocabulary and practise using punctuation to improve phrasing to make reading sound like natural speech. 

In our comprehension sessions, students will continue to be explicitly taught strategies to help them read for meaning, including asking questions before and during reading, inferring, comparing and contrasting, finding the main idea and summarising. Students will apply these skills to comprehend good-quality picture books. In addition, students will be supported in applying all the comprehension skills they have been taught to our novel, Black Cockatoo. This novel complements our learning in the Humanities Unit. 

Writing

This term, students will continue to hone their skills in narrative writing before planning, researching and writing an information report on our Humanities topic. Students will become more aware of the purpose and audience of their stories and reports. They will use strategies such as “show, don’t tell” and be shown how to expand simple sentences to develop in some detail characters, setting and events. They will also use language devices such as sizzling starts to engage the reader. Students will be supported in choosing vocabulary that more accurately expresses their ideas, replacing Tier 1 vocabulary such as said, with Tier 2 words, e.g. whispered. They will strengthen their skills in constructing simple and compound sentences, expanding their knowledge of conjunctions to link two or more clauses. They will become more adept at choosing the correct punctuation mark to end a sentence, i.e. full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, and using apostrophes in word contractions. Students will continue to practise editing their own work for structure, grammar, punctuation and spelling. 

Speaking & Listening 

Students will continue to participate in whole-class, small-group, and paired conversations in all areas of the curriculum. They will be encouraged to actively contribute to discussions, sharing their knowledge and ideas, listening thoughtfully to their peers’ points of view, and asking questions that are on topic. Students will be supported in developing skills to cooperate and interact positively and productively with their peers during group work to achieve a shared goal. 

Mathematics

This term, students began by exploring formal units of time, including hours, minutes and seconds. They have been practising to estimate the duration of familiar activities and use digital timers and stopwatches to check the accuracy of their estimates. Our Mathematics lessons will continue to focus strongly on Number and Algebra. Students will build on their understanding of multiplication and division, while also exploring the relationships between addition and subtraction, and multiplication and division, to solve problems more efficiently. They will continue to consolidate their single-digit addition and subtraction facts and apply these strategies to larger numbers. Students will also practise recalling multiplication and division facts for the 2s, 3s, 5s and 10s. Towards the end of the term, students will model and represent unit fractions, as well as conduct simple data investigations. They will create, interpret and compare different data displays to deepen their understanding.

As part of each unit of work, students will be supported in reading worded problems and exposing the key information that will allow them to solve the problem. They will make connections between different concepts, employ a range of strategies to solve the problem and justify their reasoning using mathematical language. The problems will be challenging, and students will be supported in becoming comfortable with struggle. 

Humanities  

This term, our big question in Humanities is: “Who lived here first and how do we know?” Students will explore the rich histories and continuing cultures of Australia’s First Nation Peoples, focusing on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples before European colonisation. They will learn about how First Nation Peoples are deeply connected to Country and Place, and how this connection shapes identity, knowledge, and daily life. Throughout the term, students will explore language groups, Dreaming stories and Songlines. They will discover how these systems have been used to share knowledge and understand the world for thousands of years. They will also begin to explore how we use different sources to learn about the past. Later in the term, students will participate in an incursion led by an Indigenous Elder to view and discuss bush tucker and medicinal plants and artifacts that First Nations Peoples used in both the past and are still used today. Students will finish the term by writing an information report about what they have learnt during this unit.

Wellbeing

CEPS VALUES

COURTESY    RESPECT    CO-OPERATION    RESPONSIBILITY 

This term, our CEPS value focus is Respect. Students will participate in Wellbeing sessions where they will explore and discuss ways to show respect in their interactions with others, both at school and in their everyday lives. They will also have opportunities to practise these skills through group work and social skills activities.

Students will continue their learning through our Respectful Relationships program. As part of this, they will explore how to build positive relationships by recognising their own personal strengths, as well as identifying skills and strengths they would like to further develop.

We will continue to celebrate students who demonstrate our school values through weekly awards, presented at our fortnightly Friday afternoon assemblies. 

Students may also receive CEPS raffle tickets for showing the school values, with winners drawn and announced at assembly.

Supporting learning from home

Read.  Continue to support your child in developing a habit of reading for a minimum of 15 minutes every night. Reading supports vocabulary acquisition, particularly words that are not commonly used in spoken English, and helps them internalise the skills needed for writing, e.g. text and sentence structures. Students should be provided with opportunities to read aloud to develop fluency and expression; be read to and participate in shared reading of a book - a shared book may support reluctant readers to read. Discuss what they have read so they can practise their comprehension skills. Become a member of the Kingston libraries; they have an amazing collection of books - something for everyone. 

Maths.  Students should regularly practise recalling multiplication facts and their related division facts for 1’s, 2’s, 5’s and 10’s to _ x 10 until they are automatic. Once they have mastered these facts, they should practise recalling multiplication and division facts for 3s. Automatic recall of these facts will help reduce cognitive load when problem-solving. In the Homework drive on Google Classroom, there are card games students can play with their parents or caregivers that support automatic recall of single-digit addition and subtraction facts, again essential for reducing cognitive load. Other maths activities that can be supported at home include providing incidental opportunities to read a clock and calculate elapsed time, to use measurement when building and cooking, and to calculate change when shopping. Finally, students should complete the assigned activities on Mathletics to support the acquisition of concepts and skills taught in the classroom. 

Writing. Provide opportunities for children to engage in meaningful writing, for example, send an email to a loved one, write a persuasive letter for that toy they really want, write a shopping list or write a card for a friend. For those who want to, encourage them to create books with their own stories or design a comic. 

Homework: In Year 3 Homework is expect to be daily reading routines and completion of assigned Mathletics tasks. From time to time, there will also be tasks provided to consolidate classroom learning. e.g. Writing /Handwriting / English Orthography. 

Term 2 Additional Information

Communication

You are welcome to contact your classroom teacher via email through Compass. Whilst families are navigating the transition to Compass, we are also still using Dojo for messages between parents and teachers at this stage. This is likely to be phased out at some stage this year. We are also still currently using Dojo to share learning updates from our classrooms.

With that said, you are always more than welcome to pop into the classroom before or after school if you have any queries or concerns. 

Whilst we endeavour to get back to you promptly, please understand that we are often unable to check these messages until after 3:30pm. If you need an important message to be passed on to your child, we ask that you communicate this via the office (e.g. to advise that your child will be collected early or by another family member). The office will then pass the message on to your child's classroom teacher.

Compass: Compass is the formal tool for communication regarding attendance, payments, excursions, camps, permission forms, school reports, etc.

Please use Compass to advise the school in a timely manner of all student absences.

Early Pick Up: If you need to pick up your child early, please collect them from the office area and be sure to sign them out. You will require an Early Leaver's Pass, provided by the office staff, before we are able to dismiss students. 

You can also keep up-to-date by using the school website and weekly newsletters:  http://www.cheltenhameast.vic.edu.au