Grade 3 News

📅 Important Dates & Reminders

Monday 13th October - Grade 3 Big Day Out Excursion
Tuesday 4th November - Melbourne Cup Public Holiday
Monday 10th November - Curriculum Day
Wednesday 3rd December -Market Day
Friday 5th December -Colour Run
Tuesday 9th December - Meet the Teacher (2026)
Wednesday 10th December - Christmas Concert
Friday 12th December - Meet the Teacher (2026)
Thursday 18th December - Last day of school for students
Friday 19th December -Curriculum Day

Learning in Action

📖 Literacy

This term, our Grade 3 students will be exploring The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate. The story follows Ivan, a gorilla living in captivity at a shopping centre, who forms close bonds with other animals including Stella the elephant and Bob the dog. When a young elephant named Ruby arrives, Ivan becomes determined to find her a better life. The novel highlights powerful themes such as identity, friendship, and the challenges faced by animals in captivity.

As part of this unit, students will build their knowledge of animal protection, conservation, circus animals, and endangered species. They will also focus on strengthening their sentence-level writing through activities involving conjunctions, sentence expansion, and summarising. To finish the unit, students will plan and write a persuasive piece, arguing why wild animals should be banned from circuses in Australia.

Preview –

Over the next fortnight, students will begin reading the first few chapters of the novel. As they explore the story, they will discuss key events from the chapters and examine literary devices such as similes and metaphors. At the sentence level, students will practise using the conjunctions because, but, and so to extend their ideas, as well as identifying and creating sentences with subordinating conjunctions. In whole-text writing, students will begin learning about the features of a persuasive letter.

➗ Maths

This term will see Grade 3 students engage in units on fractions and probability, followed by some shorter units on money and angles. Beginning with the fractions unit, students will deepen their understanding of fractions of both shapes and collections. In the probability unit, students will broaden their chance vocabulary when considering the likelihood of events, as well as interpreting results in chance experiments.

The second half of the term will be spent revising the four operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

Preview –

Continuing their work on fractions, students will identify halves, quarters, thirds, fifths, eighths and tenths of both shapes and collections. They will learn to combine fractions up to one whole, and explore different representations of fractions.

🗺️ Knowledge Rich Unit

This term, students will complete two Knowledge Rich units. The first, ‘The Birth of Democracy’, will allow students to learn about Ancient Greece and the origins of Athenian democracy as well as how democracy has changed over time. Students will be exposed to different forms of government and the rights, roles, and responsibilities of citizenship. They will also learn about and compare the roles of men and women in different places.

Preview –

Next week, students will focus on Sparta and Athens, comparing and contrasting the two and learning about their rivalry. The second session will focus on naming and defining different types of government.

Have a wonderful weekend,

Grade 3 Team,

Mrs Rosewarne, Mrs Stokol, Miss Egorov and Miss du Vallon