Year Three News

Year 3 in Term 4

Dear Grade Three families, 

Welcome back for Term 4. We are looking forward to another exciting term to finish off 2025, with plenty of engaging learning experiences planned across the term.

Reading

In Reading, we are completing a novel study of the text A Tangle of Knots. This text enables students to explore different points of view and helps them to solve a literary puzzle. While reading the text, students will be involved in rich discussions around both literal and inferential understanding and prompted to make and justify predictions as we read. In non-fiction we are looking at mixed multimedia on biodiversity. We will focus on the key skills of questioning - literal and inferential, visualisations, predictions, and examining literature.

Writing

Our writing this term will allow students to be creative while applying the different skills which have been developed over the first three terms. We will build our ability to identify and include literary elements within non-fiction texts such as appositives, topic sentences and topic specific vocabulary, culminating in our own information texts about Halloween. Following this, we will dive into Scaffolded Literacy, providing structured support to continue building foundational writing skills. This will help students organise their thoughts and construct coherent sentences and paragraphs.

In Spelling, students deepen their understanding of sounds through Spelling Mastery sessions. They strengthen their grapheme-phoneme connections by linking letters to sounds, while consistently practicing reading and writing words. The structured lessons in Spelling Mastery integrate phonemic, morphemic, and whole-word instruction, making spelling more accessible and supporting improved writing skills.

Mathematics

In Mathematics, students will be engaged in a range of learning opportunities across different topics. We will be learning to apply knowledge of place value by placing numbers on number lines. Students continue to strengthen their understanding of the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) by focusing on building a range of mental strategies and exploring the inverse relationships between the operations. They will work on developing fluency with the 3, 4, 5 and 10 times tables. For measurement, students explore various concepts such as capacity and angles. In our probability unit, students will learn about the language of probability to describe events. We will also be continuing Numeracy Daily Review sessions to strengthen recall and memory and to build fluency of mathematical concepts.

Units of Work

We will start this term continuing on our focus of Australian Geography from Term 2, where students learnt about our states, territories and capital cities. This term we will investigate differing types of vegetation and climate across Australia and identify similarities and differences from place to place. We will then learn about celebrations that many people within our community of West Footscray celebrate including Holi, Diwali, Ramadan, Lunar New Year, NAIDOC Week and Halloween.

Wellbeing

Within our weekly Respectful Relationships lessons, students will be looking at gender and identity, as well as positive gender relationships. If you would like further information about Respectful Relationships, please see the Department of Education Website.

Homework

We will continue to encourage and expect that students are reading for 20 minutes a day, 5 times per week, as well as logging onto Essential Assessment to complete 15 minutes of maths tasks in My Numeracy or Sunset Maths per week (or more if you want to practise).

Important Term 4 Dates