Fantastic 3/4

Term 4 Week 6

3/4 Newsletter

Welcome to Week 6 of Term 4! 

We can’t believe we’re already halfway through the final term of the year! Time is flying by in 3/4. We hope all students enjoyed a restful long weekend in Week 5, they certainly came back refreshed and ready to learn. Last week, we were lucky to have two exciting guest speakers visit our school. Students listened to the author of My Grandad Marches on Anzac Day (Catriona Hoy), who shared wonderful insights into writing and storytelling. We also had the pleasure of meeting Olympian curler Dean Hewitt, whose inspiring story about perseverance and teamwork captivated everyone. The students were so engaged and left feeling motivated to chase their own goals and dreams!

Literacy:

Our students have begun writing their very own quest narratives, and it has been wonderful to see their creativity shine! They have worked hard to develop engaging stories that include brave protagonists, loyal allies, and clever antagonists who challenge their heroes along the way. The students are using descriptive language to bring their settings and adventures to life, showing a fantastic understanding of story structure and character development. We can’t wait to see their ideas come together as they begin typing up their independent writing pieces next week, it’s sure to be an exciting collection of imaginative and inspiring tales!

Phonics: 

In Phonics, we have been focusing on the vowel suffix rule. This rule helps students understand how to correctly add endings such as -ing, -ed, -er, and -est to base words. Students have been learning that when a base word ends with a silent e, we drop the e before adding the suffix (for example, make → making). If a base word has one short vowel followed by one consonant, we double the final consonant (run → running), and if the base word ends with two consonants or a vowel team, we simply add the suffix (jump → jumping). Students have enjoyed practising this rule through reading, spelling, and writing activities, helping them build confidence when working with longer and more complex words.

Phonics focus for the term: 

Maths:

In Mathematics, our Year 3 students have been exploring multiplication using tens blocks to build a strong understanding of grouping, repeated addition, and place value. This hands-on approach helps students visualise multiplication as equal groups and lays the foundation for more efficient strategies. This learning  focuses on developing understanding of the connection between multiplication and division, and representing multiplication facts using materials, arrays, and repeated addition. Meanwhile, our Year 4 students have begun an exciting new unit on probability. They are learning to describe and compare the likelihood of everyday events and use language such as likely, unlikely, certain, and impossible to explain their reasoning. This supports students in ordering and describing chance events, which involves identifying events that are dependent or mutually exclusive.

Science 

This term in Science, students are exploring the roles and relationships of living things within different habitats. They are learning about producers, consumers, and decomposers, and how each plays an important part in maintaining balance within an ecosystem. Students will observe living things in the local environment and classify them based on their roles, as well as research different types of decomposers and their importance. They will represent feeding relationships using food chains and compare how these differ across various habitats. 

Extra Announcements:

• Bike ed every Wednesday morning 10am 
• Homework is handed out each Friday and will be collected the following Friday 
• Hats are required in Term 4