Grade 3

Reading

Our Adventure with The Iron Man

This week, Grade 3 students have completed reading the exciting novel The Iron Man by Ted Hughes. The story begins with a mysterious giant made of metal who appears on a hilltop. At first, the farmers are afraid because he eats their machinery. But later, Iron Man becomes a hero when he saves the whole world from the space-bat-angel-dragon!

Highlights from the Story

The Iron Man crashing down and rebuilding himself.
Hogarth’s bravery in helping the Iron Man.
The epic challenge between the Iron Man and the space-bat-angel-dragon.

Skills We Practiced

Predicting – We stopped during reading to guess what might happen next. For example, we wondered, Would the Iron Man stay dangerous, or would he help people?
Inferring – We looked for clues that weren’t directly said in the text. For instance, even when the farmers were angry, we could tell Hogarth trusted the Iron Man because of his actions and words.
Summarising – After each chapter, we practiced telling the main ideas in just a few sentences. This helped us focus on the most important parts of the story instead of every small detail.

Writing

Our Information Reports on Iron

This week, Grade 3 students have been busy becoming experts on the mineral iron! We researched, planned, and wrote our very own information reports to teach others about this important metal.

What We Learned About Iron

In our reports, we explained:

How iron can be shaped, moulded, and formed into useful objects.
The different things made from iron, such as tools, cars, and buildings.
The physical characteristics of iron, like its shiny silver colour and strong nature.

Writing Skills We Practiced

Planning – Students organised their ideas under clear subheadings.
Drafting – We wrote paragraphs with topic sentences and supporting details.
Editing and Uplevelling – Students checked spelling, punctuation, and added descriptive words to make their writing stronger.

This week, we finished our reports by writing a conclusion. Students learned how to wrap up their information by reminding the reader of the most important points. For example, many students ended by explaining why iron is useful and important in our everyday lives.

Maths

Over the past few weeks, our Year 3 students have been working hard on building their problem-solving skills in mathematics. Here’s what we’ve been learning so far:

Bar Models for Addition & Subtraction

Students have been learning how to represent problems visually using bar models. This strategy helps them clearly see the relationship between parts and the whole when solving both addition and subtraction problems.

CUBES Strategy for Word Problems

We have introduced the CUBES strategy (Circle, Underline, Box, Evaluate, Solve), which helps students carefully read and understand word problems. This gives them a step-by-step approach to work out what the question is asking.

Exploring Strategies for Subtraction

Students have been practising different subtraction strategies such as “counting back,” “take away,” and “finding the difference.” They are also learning to use key words like left over, less than, and difference to understand problems.

Through these lessons, students are building their confidence in problem solving, explaining their thinking, and noticing important details in word problems.

Humanities

In our Geography lessons, students have enjoyed independently researching and finding information about countries and animals in Africa and South America. They have loved using these facts to create posters about an animal of their choice.

DreamCity Incursion

In week 8, Grade 3 students were treated with an incursion from DreamCity. They learnt about how Virtual Reality is used in the real world, and discussed possible ways that VR might help to shape and better society in the future. And of course, they loved putting on the VR headsets, picking up the controllers and exploring virtual worlds.