2/3A

📚 Literacy

We have had lots of fun celebrating Book Week in our classroom! Students embraced the opportunity to dress up as their favourite book characters and share their love of reading with others. We listened to some of the Book Week shortlisted stories, making predictions, sharing our thoughts and discussing what made each story interesting and memorable. A class favoruite was 'Dear Broccoli', which tells a story about a young boy who hates to eat broccoli. 

We also put our book knowledge to the test with some fun trivia about well-known books, characters and authors. It was wonderful to see students so enthusiastic about books and excited to share their favourite stories with their classmates. 

In our mentor text unit, students have been exploring how authors use language to help readers create vivid pictures in their minds. Using Mallee Sky as our mentor text, we have been learning about noun groups and similes, noticing how descriptive language can make writing more engaging and powerful. Mallee Sky has provided a wonderful opportunity to expand our vocabulary and think carefully about how our word choices influence what a reader sees, hears and feels. We have been co-constructing our own similes and experimenting with descriptive language to strengthen our writing and bring our ideas to life. 

As a class, we co-constructed some similes...

• We hear a sound on the tin roof, like thousands of tiny footsteps running on the ground. 
• In the morning, baby galahs chirp loudly, like the sound of kids playing at school.

🔢 Numeracy

Our recent Algebra unit took us into the world of supermarkets! Students explored mathematical concepts through a hands-on supermarket theme, identifying the arrays hidden within shelves of products and using these to help with stocktake. We created multiplication facts to represent the different arrays and explored how repeated addition can also be used to calculate quantities.

As our supermarket developed, students priced their shelves and worked out how much money different ranges of products could make. We then put our mathematical skills to the test with a shopkeeper and shopper role-play. Students visited a peer's supermarket to make a purchase, while the shopkeeper calculated the total cost using multiplication and repeated addition. Once the shopper had paid, the shopkeeper then had to calculate the change required.

This provided a fantastic opportunity for students to see how the mathematical concepts we have been learning can be applied to authentic, everyday situations. It was wonderful to see students problem-solving, communicating their mathematical thinking and putting their multiplication skills into action. 

🏌️Golf Incursion

Last week, our Grade 3 students took part their first golf clinic, with Tony Collier. 

We started by Tony demonstrating how to hold the club correctly. Then, after we had a go, we got 30 balls to hit in each group, with each person having 5 hits each. Once we all finished, we collected the balls and then got to have another go. We had to stay behind the fence to make sure we didn't get hit by the golf balls, and a couple of people hit their ball all the way over the fence. Tony taught us a couple of different ways to hold the club, one way was to link our pinky fingers together, and another way was to intertwine your fingers together. Our favourite way to hold the club is to just rest your hands together. 

We were happy to finally have our first golf session, and we are looking forward to having another go at trying to hit the ball even further, and over the fence again. 

By Ashton & Charlie G