Grade 3 Community News
Dear Year 3 Families,
We hope you're enjoying Term 2 as much as we are!
Our students have been actively engaged in their learning, and we're excited about the upcoming excursion to the Melbourne Museum in Weeks 8 and 9. This excursion offers a fantastic opportunity for students to explore Australia's rich history and cultural heritage. Students will engage with interactive exhibits that bring learning to life, enhancing their understanding of the topics we've been covering in class. To ensure your child can participate, please provide consent and make the necessary payment through the Compass portal prior to June 16th. Timely completion of these steps is crucial for finalising our arrangements with the museum, late payments cannot be accepted.
Knowledge Building Unit - Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening.
In Weeks 7 and 8, we continued our study of the book Off We Go Around Australia. This unit combines four of Roland Harvey's travel books—At the Beach, To the Top End, All the Way to W.A., and In the Bush—into one volume for an unforgettable Australian adventure—the journey from the northern tip to the western reaches of Australia, exploring the nation's wonders.
Off We Go Around Australia helps students make text-to-self connections by encouraging them to relate their own experiences and knowledge to the geography of Australia's states and capital cities, deepening their understanding of familiar and new places across the country.
In writing, we are continuing to look at explanatory texts. In week 6, we explored how to structure the introduction of an explanatory text. In week 7, students drafted an introduction and first body paragraph of their own explanatory texts looking at how rivers are formed. In our lessons on sentence structure, we have been learning the difference between common and proper nouns. A common noun is a general name for a person, place, thing, or idea—for example: city, teacher, dog, or book. It is not capitalized unless it begins a sentence. A proper noun, on the other hand, is the specific name of a particular person, place, thing, or organization—for example: Sydney, Mr. Smith, Fido, or Harry Potter. Proper nouns are always capitalized.
Numeracy—Patterns
In maths, we have begun a new unit: Patterns! In this unit, students build on earlier multiplication and division facts and sequences work, to deepen their understanding of patterns involving multiples (the product of that number and a whole number). This knowledge is then applied in future multiplication and division units of work. Students are supported with instruction in the use of algorithms.
Vocabulary
Our target words are provided this term from our novel study, Off We Go Around Australia. Our week 7 words were solitude, scurried, preposterous, elusive, creaky, bored. Our week 8 words are humongous, borrowed, bungle, rare, expedition, demonstration.
Students enjoy sharing their learning of these words with you, and we encourage you to support and surprise them by using these words when the opportunity presents itself.
Friendly Reminders
● We ask students to read for 20 minutes each school day and then record their reading nights in their student reading journals that we keep at school to track their reading nights. Young readers who read frequently develop essential reading skills.
● We thank and remind families to continue to support their children in charging their iPads and bringing their headphones ready for each school day.
● In weeks 8 and 9, we have our upcoming excursion to the Melbourne Museum; please make payment & give consent ASAP. Payments must be made prior to June 16th.
PLC 3