Year 3 Term 2 Newsletter

Welcome to Term 2

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

 Specialist Timetable

Important Dates

13/5: Special Food Day

9/6: King’s Birthday Public Holiday

26/6 Excursion: Living Culture – Guided Walk & cultural talk, Mornington Penisula.

1/7: Curriculum Day

4/7: Last Day Early Dismissal at 2.30 pm

4/7: Student reports available on Sentral 

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 Sentral 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 [sh] sound made by the letters <ti> in station. 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 more complex and technical words. In our comprehension sessions, students will continue to be explicitly taught strategies to help them read for meaning, including asking questions, making connections to themselves and to other texts, inferring, differentiating between fact and opinion and summarising. Students will apply these skills to comprehend good quality picture books. In the second half of the term students will be supported in applying all the comprehension skills they have been taught this Semester to our novel. 

Writing

This term, students will continue to develop 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” to develop in some detail characters, setting and events, and practise using language devices such as sizzling starts to engage the reader. Students will be supported in choosing vocabulary that more accurately express their ideas, e.g. replacing said with whispered. They will strengthen their skills in constructing simple and compound sentences, expanding their knowledge of conjunctions to join two or more clauses. They will become more adept at choosing the correct punctuation mark to end a sentence 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 conversation 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 views and asking questions and providing feedback that is on topic. During group work, students will be supported in developing skills to interact positively and collaborate with their peers to achieved a shared goal. 

Mathematics

This term, our lessons will continue to have a strong emphasis on Number and Algebra continuing on with addition and subtraction before extending students’ knowledge of the operations to multiplication and division  Students will use the relationship between addition and subtraction and multiplication and division to solve problems. They will continue to consolidate their single digit addition and subtraction facts, extending them to larger numbers, and will practise recalling multiplication and division facts for 2’s, 3’s, 5’s and 10’s. Students will model and represent unit fractions. They will conduct simple data investigations and create, interpret and compare data displays. Similarly students will carry out and interpret simple chance experiments. Students will apply their knowledge and skills to solving simple worded problems and use mathematical language to justify their decisions.

Humanities  

This term for our unit on history, we ask “Who lived here first and how do we know?” Students will explore the diversity and longevity of the world’s oldest continuous culture; Australia's First Peoples. Our focus is on Indigenous history and culture before colonisation by Europeans. Students will investigate Indigenous language groups, the Dreaming and Songlines. They will understand how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are connected to Country and Place and how this influences their daily lives. Towards the end of the term, students will go on an excursion to the Mornington Penisular for a guided walk with an Indigenous educator to experience Aboriginal culture first hand and to view and discuss some artefacts that Indigenous people used both in the past and are still used today. 

Wellbeing

Students will continue to participate in wellbeing sessions where we will model and discuss respectful relationships. These lessons foster our school values and support students' personal and social growth. When possible, we will have Fun Friday where students have an opportunity for free play with their peers to practise and develop key social skills.

We continue to support each and every student on their learning journey and help them understand that their abilities can grow through effort. They will continue to be encouraged to step beyond their comfort zone, develop confidence in participating in new challenges, and become active, reflective learners.

CEPS VALUES

COURTESY    RESPECT    CO-OPERATION    RESPONSIBILITY 

We continue to give out weekly awards on a Friday afternoon assembly  for students who have displayed the CEPS values.

Your child may receive a CEPS raffle ticket for displaying the school values! CEPS Kids are Friendly Kids award winners will be drawn and announced during assembly on Friday afternoons. 

Supporting learning from home

Read. Support your child in developing a habit of reading for a minimum of 15 minutes every night. They can: read aloud to develop fluency and expression; be read to; and/or participate in shared reading of a book. Discuss what they have read so they can practise their comprehension skills. There are questions on Google Classroom that can be used to prompt a conversation. 

Maths. Your child should practise recalling single digit addition facts to 20 and their corresponding subtraction facts until they are automatic. There are card and dice games on Google Classroom to help your child develop this knowledge. Your child should also practise recalling multiplication facts to 2's, 3's, 5's and 10's to  __ x 10, again until they are fluent. Continue to provide opportunities for your child to use their maths in their everyday life, for example supporting them to read a clock and calculate elapsed time, use measurement when building and cooking, interpret results of a sporting match and/or manage their pocket money. Activities are regularly assigned on Mathletics that compliment the topics studied in class and can be completed as part of their homework.

Writing. 

Read good quality picture books and novels together. Discuss how the authors have used words, sentences and language devices to create characters, settings and events. Draw your child's attention to new vocabulary and discuss its meaning and how it is used. Enable your child to participate in a range of experiences, e.g. going to the city or watching a football match at the MCG, so they can draw upon these experiences when writing. Provide opportunities for children to engage in meaningful writing, for example writing a holiday journal. 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. Maths problems/ Writing /Handwriting / English Orthography. These will be posted on Google Classroom. 

Communication

If you have any queries along the way, please feel free to contact us using our emails listed below or you can send a Class Dojo. If any more urgent concerns arise, please organise a time to meet with your child’s teacher.

Kate Burman (catherine.burman@education.vic.gov.au)

Bec Crawford (rebecca.crawford2@education.vic.gov.au) 

If you need an important message to be passed onto your child, we ask that you communicate this via the office.  

We use Sentral to communicate School and Year 3 Information and Class Dojo to communicate the following: - 1:1 communication between teachers and families. 

On occasion, we will post photos to celebrate classroom learning.