From the 3/4 Classrooms
Important Dates
Thursday 4th December - Toon World Incursion
Wednesday 10th December - Scienceworks Excursion
English
Last week, our focus was on collective nouns and the students absolutely loved it! They became “word detectives,” searching through a variety of texts to discover interesting and unusual collective nouns. A murder of crows, a parliamentof owls, a bouquet of flowers… the list kept growing! Students also enjoyed taking part in fun games and activities to build their vocabulary and language knowledge.
We continued reading our mentor text, Brindabella, and have been diving deeper into its rich themes. Our focus has been on exploring how Brindabella’s journey reflects the key messages of courage, survival, and freedom. Through independent reading and group discussions, students have been identifying events that connect to these messages and the overall plot. Each student then chose one significant event from the story and wrote to explain how it links to a key message. This supported their ability to infer meaning and use evidence from the text to justify their thinking.
We also explored how the themes of courage, trust, fear, belonging, kindness, and friendship are expressed through the characters’ experiences. Teachers highlighted specific words and phrases as clues, and students used these to draw deeper conclusions about how characters grow and change. Students then selected one character and described how that character experiences a key message, supporting their ideas with examples from the story.
Mathematics
This week in Maths, we will be focusing on adding decimal numbers, with a particular emphasis on money. Students will practise adding money amounts, calculating totals, and working out change in real-life scenarios. These activities will strengthen their number fluency and their understanding of decimals in everyday contexts.
Integrated Studies - Frame by Frame
In Integrated Studies, students are beginning the exciting process of creating their own stories, which will later be transformed into Stop Motion Animations.
This week, students will:
- Create a character profile for the main character they will use in their animation
- Explore different story settings and how these environments influence the characters’ feelings and actions
- Form partnerships or small groups for their stop-motion project
- Write a short story or a scene that includes their planned characters and no more than two different settings
This planning phase will set them up for success when they begin animating.
Next week, we have our ToonWorld Incursion, where students will experience the process of creating their own Stop Motion Animation. We are incredibly excited for them to bring their stories to life—and we look forward to sharing the finished animations with you at our Expo!
Prepared by the Team 3/4 Teachers