3/4 Steiner & 

Mainstream

What we’ve been up to:

3/4 are back into the swing of things with our new unit focus, ‘Design and Engineering’. So far, students have constructed Lego zipline cages and experimented with building bridges using materials such as card, paper straws, paper clips, tape, and string. We’re excited to continue this hands-on unit and look forward to creating projects the students can be very proud of!

Maths

Students collected data on rubbish items found in the school grounds and at Henderson Park by extension, then presented their findings using a graph type of their choice- line, column, bar, pictogram, or pie chart. The results clearly showed that we do, in fact, have a rubbish problem! Our 3/4 students planned to perform a short role play at assembly about picking up rubbish and caring for Country to share their findings with the school, but unfortunately, the weather washed out our assembly. 

In addition, students began a new unit on probability. They created imaginative hypothetical scenarios and used persuasive language to argue the likelihood of these events occurring, making connections between the language of probability and percentages, decimals, and fractions. 

Literacy

In literacy, we have continued to work on our spelling program daily, focusing on joined phonemes through a range of hands-on and collaborative activities. This regular practice is helping students become more confident and accurate spellers.

In Writer’s Workshop, we shifted our focus to dialogue - how it sounds, how it’s written, and how it brings characters to life. Students learned to identify and use the correct punctuation for dialogue, including speech marks, commas, and capital letters. They examined examples in mentor texts and practiced writing their own dialogue that matched their characters’ voices and personalities.

Reading dialogue was also a key focus. Students explored how to read character conversations with expression, thinking about how the characters might be feeling and using tone and pacing to reflect that. We practiced reading aloud in pairs and small groups, using body language and voice to bring characters to life.

Alongside our work on dialogue, students revisited the use of past, present, and future tense in their writing. Through guided editing sessions, they practiced identifying and correcting verb tenses in their sentences to ensure consistency and clarity in their storytelling. These focused grammar lessons are helping students strengthen their writing and become more reflective editors.

What’s coming up:

• In Maths, students will continue learning about probability, then move into measurement: volume and capacity. 
• In Literacy, students will continue looking at perspectives; changing tense of existing texts; rewriting bad texts with correct tense, etc. 

Things families can talk about at home:

• Wearing sun smart hats during play time. 
• Discuss with your child at home about the engineering challenge they completed this week - building their own bridges and testing how much weight they could hold. Ask them to explain what made their bridge strong or what caused it to bend or break. Talk about the importance of balance, support, and materials in building sturdy bridges.
• Students can practise their spellings by using flashcards, where they write the word on one side and the meaning or a sentence on the other. They can quiz themselves or ask a family member to help test them. Another fun way is to write a short story or comic using as many of their spelling words as possible, which helps reinforce the words in context.