Year 3/4 Mainstream

What we’ve been up to:

We have been super busy over the last two weeks with transition mornings in our new classes, visiting the Book Fair, and building our board games as part of our integrated project. Transition mornings have given students a wonderful chance to get a feel for their new learning spaces, meet their future teachers, and begin forming connections with classmates. It’s been lovely to see their confidence grow as they explore what next year has in store.

Our visit to the Book Fair added even more excitement to the fortnight. Students browsed an amazing range of books, chatted eagerly about their favourite genres, and made thoughtful choices about what they might like to read next.

Meanwhile, our integrated project has been in full swing as students designed and built their own board games. From planning themes and rules to crafting creative game pieces and testing out their prototypes with friends, the process has been filled with imagination, problem-solving, and lots of collaboration.

Maths

Over the past fortnight in Mathematics, we’ve been focusing on how to solve multi-step worded problems. Students have practised highlighting the numbers in the problem and the operations they’ll need to use in order to solve them. For example, ‘Sal works as a vet for 3 hours a day, 2 days a week. She treats 4 animals every hour. How many animals does Sal treat in one week?’. Students identified the important information (3 hours a day, 2 days a week, 4 animals every hour, and one week) and explored solving the problem using tables and drawings.

We also explored equivalent fractions and how they connect to decimals and percentages. Students learned that fractions can be represented in different but equal forms (for example, 1/2 is the same as 2/4), and they practised finding and creating these equivalents using visual models and number patterns. We also looked at how fractions link to decimals and percentages - for instance, understanding that 1/4 equals 0.25 and 25%. This helped students see that these three representations are simply different ways of describing the same value.

Literacy

Over the past fortnight, students have engaged in researching famous Australian inventors, inspired by our inquiry focus on innovation and design. Students explored famous inventions and their creators, considering the impact these innovations have had in Australia and globally. Using our guiding research questions, students investigated:

What was the initial problem?
Were there any challenges that arose during the design process?
What makes the invention unique compared to existing solutions?
How does the invention benefit people or solve the identified problem?

Students planned their ideas carefully and have now moved into the creation stage, designing informative and visually engaging posters to showcase their findings.

In writing, students have continued to use the wordless picture books Chalk, The Lion and the Mouse and Goodnight Gorilla to create, revise, and publish their own imaginative narratives.

ur phoneme program continues to strengthen students’ spelling knowledge. Alongside targeted phoneme work last week, this fortnight we have explored the ‘k’ and ‘oy’ phoneme families. Through active literacy games, spelling menu tasks, dictation, diacritical marking and collecting new vocabulary, students are becoming increasingly confident and accurate spellers.

What’s coming up:

Summer Seasons Farewell: Friday 5th December
In our unit focus, students will be finalising their games and sharing their designs with others.
In Literacy, students will be presenting their inventor posters and learning how to give effective feedback.
In Maths, we will be working on our partitioning skills to 10,000.

Things families can talk about at home:

Wearing sun smart hats during play time.
Simple machines.
How to give effective constructive feedback.