Year 3/4

Hi families!

This week in Grade 3/4, our students have really pushed through with their learning as we begin to wrap up Term 1. Our class has done an incredible job adapting to the changes they've had, and we appreciate all the patience and support parents have given over the last few weeks.

Writing – Students have been honing their narrative skills by incorporating dialogue into their stories. They practiced using dialogue tags followed by conjunctions and actions. For example, "Run!" said Leo as he ran through the pen.

Reading – Our focus has been on enhancing reading fluency and balancing this with deeply exploring narrative texts (our class novel, Leo and Ralph) and the style/techniques authors use to write narrative texts (similes, metaphors and more).

To practice their fluency, students tackled a narrative reading passage about a storm and worked hard to be accurate, smooth, and show appropriate expression. The reading passage was technically four texts, each with differing levels of difficulty, and words per minute ranging between 100–180. This approach allowed each student to challenge themselves appropriately, starting with simple sentences and advancing to more complex structures that encouraged more expressive reading when they were reading. We'll continue this approach multiple times each week with different texts throughout the year.

Spelling – We explored four new phonetic patterns:

• One group studied double and triple consonant blends at the beginning and end of words.
• Another group focused on the a-e split vowel digraph representing the long /a/ sound.
• A third group examined words where 'ph' produces the /f/ sound, often derived from Ancient Greek.

Inquiry – Students have almost completed their presentations on biodegradability. It's been great to see how their understanding of this concept has developed, especially considering many had very little knowledge of it at the start.

Religious Education – We continued to look at Easter, Jesus's final weeks, and how that links to the themes of sacrifice and love, and how we can show that in our lives.

Maths – We’ve been wrapping up our topic of multiplication and division. Students are very familiar with creating multiplication and division equations, how they can be represented with arrays and vice versa. They can also explain how repeated addition and sequencing link with this. We've briefly touched on using algorithms for multiplication towards the end.

Friday – We finished up the week with a great sports day! The students were incredibly resilient during a day that can feel quite long out in the sun, and it was great seeing them give their netball, basketball, and football skills a go, and encouraging their classmates to do the same!

Thank you for your continued support, and I look forward to our last week of Term 1!

Matt, Grade 3/4 Teacher