Level 3: Connect

Hello Level 3 Families,

Welcome to Week 4 of Term 4! With the sunshine brightening our days, our students are diving deep into their learning and celebrating their hard work.

In Reading and Writing, we’ve been exploring The Boy and the Elephant by Freya Blackwood, focusing on making inferences and various comprehension strategies. This unique picture book has no words, prompting us to unpack the rich illustrations. We watched an interview with Freya Blackwood, discussing her decision to create a wordless book. Students have been working on story maps, outlining the beginning, lead-up, climax (problem), resolution, and ending. We also listened to a musical interpretation of the text by Zoe Barry, discussing the effects of music on storytelling. Students had fun writing words to accompany the illustrations and exploring the characters in the story.

In Maths, our focus has been on chance and probability, emphasising the language of chance and probability lines. Students have engaged with games like Ninny Ninny and Greedy Pig to explore these concepts. They are learning about the predictability of chance, conducting repeated trials of chance experiments, and discussing the results. This week, we’re identifying angles in our environment, comparing different types of angles to right angles—are they bigger or smaller? As an extension, we’ve been labelling angles (right, acute, obtuse, straight line, reflex) and connecting them to degrees (a right angle is 90 degrees, a straight line is 180 degrees, and a full circle equals 360 degrees).

In Inquiry, we’ve been learning about the nutritional value of different foods based on their colours—for example, orange foods are high in beta carotene and vitamin A. We’ve also discussed the qualities of a good friend, and the personal and social skills needed to build and strengthen relationships. Below is a link to a video we watched and discussed together about boundaries. We are going to be focusing on mental health and learning about ourselves, emotions and needs. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSFvJbSQdA4

For wellbeing, students identified big emotions they sometimes experience and the coping strategies they currently use or could use. We’ve also focused on online bullying, examining the behaviour of a bully and exploring the underlying factors, such as jealousy, low self-esteem, power dynamics, and lack of empathy. Students created characters—either a bully, victim, or bystander—and wrote about how their character might be feeling inside.

DuringScience, students have been learning all about how to conduct fair tests. They have seen many examples of unfair testing and there have been lots of rich discussions around how to make experiments fair. Next week, they will be participating in a day-long experiment in the classroom and learning the importance of observation.

Extra Home Learning

Spelling

Rule: y becomes i when adding a suffix

Use your spelling tools to add the suffix - est (meaning most) to these words

 early > earliest

tidy

busy

heavy

noisy

happy  

Reading

The Boy and the Elephant 

What do you think Freya Blackwood would like readers to think about or feel while reading this story?

Writing

Write about a character who is feeling scared of another person by describing (showing) their body language, rather than saying (telling) the character is scared.

Maths

Find one of each of these angles in your environment and write them down: right angle, obtuse angle, acute angle, straight line angle, reflex angle.

ERP

Identify and list some qualities that you have, which would make you a good friend to others.