Grade 3 Community News
Dear Year 3 Families,
We hope that you and your family are enjoying Term 4 as much as we are here at TRPS! It’s been wonderful to see all the students working hard, having fun, and learning new things every day.
Knowledge Building Unit
We have now come to the end of our class novel The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate. Students have shown wonderful growth as readers and writers, using their predicting and inferencing skills to explore the story’s characters, themes, and emotional moments. This learning has flowed beautifully into their persuasive writing, where they have been crafting letters to the Minister urging a national ban on wild animals in circuses. It’s been inspiring to see how passionate and thoughtful they are, thinking about real-life ways they can help animals and make positive change. As we conclude this unit, we look forward to beginning our next exciting text, where students will continue to build on their reading and writing skills through new ideas and challenges.
The following new unit starts with a powerful and important book, Finding Our Heart by Thomas Mayo. This story helps students understand The Uluru Statement from the Heart in an honest and age-appropriate way, using engaging language and beautiful illustrations to explore Australia’s past and our shared future. Through this text, students will reflect on themes of voice, belonging, and reconciliation, learning what it means to listen, be fair, and work together respectfully. As part of this unit, students will be learning to identify the purpose, audience, structure, and features of a book report, applying these skills to share their own thoughtful reflections on the story. At home, you might like to ask your child what they have learned about the Uluru Statement and how we can all play a part in caring for and respecting the heart of our nation.
Numeracy
In Week 5, students have been exploring chance experiments to understand how probability works in real life. They have enjoyed making predictions, testing their ideas, and recording the outcomes of different activities such as rolling dice, tossing coins, and using spinners. These hands-on experiences have helped them describe events as likely, unlikely, certain, or impossible, while comparing their results using tables and graphs. You can support this learning at home by encouraging your child to talk about everyday.
In Week 6, students will begin learning about multiplication and division. They will explore the relationship between the two operations through repeated addition, equal groups, and sharing activities. Using concrete materials and visual models will help them understand these concepts before moving on to more abstract problems. At home, you can reinforce this learning by practising skip counting, identifying equal groups in everyday situations (such as sharing snacks), or playing games that involve simple multiplication facts.
Vocabulary
Our target words for week 5 are from our novel, The One and Only Ivan fascinate, bicker, brittle, flimsy, ambles, and savour. Our week 6 words are Invented, accept, survived, invited, attached and flourish.
Students enjoy sharing what they have learned about these words with you, and we encourage you to support and surprise them by using them when the opportunity presents itself.
Friendly Reminders
- We ask students to read for 20 minutes each school day and then record their reading nights in their student reading journals, which we keep at school to track their reading. Young readers who read frequently develop essential reading skills.
- We thank families and remind them to continue supporting their children by charging their iPads and bringing their headphones ready for each school day.
- We would like to remind students and families of our iPad expectations. Students must keep their iPads in their bags before and after school. Students have been reminded of this expectation, and consequences will be applied: they will lose their iPad privileges in the classroom.
- A reminder of our upcoming athletics excursion on Thursday 4th December, and our health incursion on Tuesday, 18th November. Please make payment/consent for these events as soon as possible, thank you.
