Grade 3 News

Message from the Principal

Dear Pegasus Family,

I want to thank you for your support and messages of thanks in what has been a difficult week for us all. Our staff and students did an amazing job on Wednesday with keeping students  safe and then yesterday with supporting them. I want to thank you for your flexibility and calmness in collecting students on Wednesday as we tried to avoid the emergency services that were in Bellfield Drive.  At all times our actions were taken to ensure the physical and emotional safety of the community. I recognise that the delay in communication caused anxiety for families, as you can imagine there were many things for us to manage that afternoon with our number 1 priority being to ensure we had supports in place for students and staff.

Once again I thank you for support and best wishes.

Regards,

Adam Wight

Principal

Important Reminders

Tuesday, August 13th: STEM Celebration Day

Tuesday, August 20th: Swimming Program (every Tuesday for 5 weeks, finishing on September 17th)

Wednesday, August 21st: Book Week Dress Up Day

Thursday, August 22nd: Father’s Day Stall

Monday, September 16th: Celebration Morning 

Friday, September 20th: Last Day of Term 3 - 2.30 pm finish

Homework 👍  Mathletics and reading.  For those wishing to practise their Maths Masters skills, we have linked the belts with some online games.   Your child should be able to tell you what belt they are practising All master belts

Learning in Action

Literacy: Following on from free verse poems, students have been analysing the more structured forms of poetry: Cinquain and Haiku poems. Using the structure of these forms of poetry, students have chosen topics of interest to craft their own poems. We have been reading a variety of stories and discussing the symbolism used by authors and the moral or lesson of each story. We have focussed on word choice, and the use of images and colours to help interpret the author’s meaning. Students have continued to work on their grammar and have been focusing on the use of possessive pronouns (mine, my, hers, his, theirs, ours, yours, its, whose) within sentences and applying these skills to their writing pieces.  

Preview: During our grammar work, students will revisit the use of coordinating conjunctions when constructing sentences. We will also analyse the use of rhythm and onomatopoeia (e.g. whoosh, bang) in poetry and how these can be used to enhance our poems. 

Maths: Students have continued to work on their multiplication goals. During this time, students work in small groups, working with the teacher, on the Chromebooks and independently at their tables to progress towards their goals (see pictures below). As a whole class, students have focused on using the times tables they know to solve other multiplication problems. Students have learnt that they can double and halve numbers to help them solve more complex problems. Students have partitioned numbers and used the split strategy, splitting arrays to help solve different multiplication problems e.g. 6x4=3x4+3x4. Students are continuing learning about time and will focus on quarter to and past, reading analogue clocks to the minute and elapsed time.

Preview: Over the next fortnight students will apply their understanding of multiplication to games and puzzles using the skills and strategies they have learnt over the multiplication unit. Beginning Week 6 students will start a unit on division. Students will begin this by learning about multiplication and division and how they are inverse operations. 

Inquiry: Continuing with our history topic for the term, Grade 3 students have explored the Dreaming and the importance of these stories to Aboriginal culture. Students learnt about songlines and other verbal ways of passing down information from one generation to the next, and they analysed the important messages that were being told in the stories and songs. Students then had the opportunity to create their own version of a Dreamtime story, including a moral or lesson to be learnt from it.

Students then looked at the Aboriginal tradition of possum skin cloaks, and how a person’s cloak can represent themselves by displaying important symbols from their lives. Students then created their own possum skin cloaks, and had to justify why they selected those images to represent themselves.

Preview: Starting from Week 5, students will be rotating around to the different grade 3 teachers to learn more about four different aspects of Aboriginal culture; Art, Food, Tools and Shelter. Students will travel around in their class for the next four weeks, learning about a different topic with a different teacher each week. Students will be creating a poster to display their learning and adding to it each week.

 Wellbeing:Students have continued to identify their strong emotions, particularly focusing on anger and taming angry feelings.  Students added other strategies to the list they had created when making their Calm Down Sandwich last week and highlighted their favourite ones and others they wanted to try. 

Did you know that, in addition to our regular program, every class spends 5-10 minutes doing a mindfulness activity each day? This includes breathing exercises, meditation, drawing, gratitude list and shoutouts. Students are building their skills and developing their capacity to calm and soothe themselves.

Preview: Next fortnight we will be reviewing the 4 Friendship Facts. Then we will look at scenarios and have lots of discussion to identify Mean on Purpose and Friendship Fires and use the Friend-O-Cycle to help us resolve them.

Grade 3 Team,

Mrs Stokol, Miss Du Vallon, Mrs Alexander, Mrs Huxley and Mrs Rosewarne