Classroom News

What a wonderful start the Grade 3's have made for 2025. 

For some our classroom has remained familiar, if not a little refreshed. For a few is has been a new learning environment and they have adjusted well to the change.  

This year is a year of big changes in our curriculum with the launch of Magnify throughout all Sandhurst schools. This has led to changes with our learning from day one of this term.  

We are now using a program called Ochre to help guide us through Literacy and Numeracy. It is very structured and supports all students and their abilities. Through this program the Grade 3's have loved starting their novel study- Matilda by Roald Dahl. Using our modelling from this novel we are slowly learning how to write a well-structured narrative. We have created many different characters throughout our narratives including characters such as Megatron and Miss Honey and we are excited to write the problems for our narratives next week. As a class we are learning many new routines including our Daily Literacy Review, Literacy and Literature (our novel study). This new way of learning has been challenging, however every single student in our class has found something to celebrate already and it's only Week 5! 

In Mathematics we have just finished our first unit which was focussed on Place Value where we were learning to read, expand and regroup numbers up to the hundreds of thousands. Once again, we have been challenged by this but through practice and the daily math reviews we have continued to grow in reading and manipulating these ginormous numbers.  

If the start of the term couldn’t get any bigger, we got to go to camp! I was so proud of how all Grade 3/4 students conducted themselves, built resilience, firmed friendships and partnerships within our class. It was amazing to see everyone supporting each other with empathy and heart, not giving up on anything. Some of our favourite activities were the giant swing and archery. As a class we decided the most challenging activities were tree climbing and the leap of faith. We also decided that we think the trick is to not look down. 

Finally, I look forward to seeing many families during our Opening Mass and picnic this Friday starting at the Church at 12noon.  

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out at any point throughout the year either via Dojo message or via my email: rsinclair@olwangaratta.catholic.edu.au