Year 3

Hello wonderful Year 3 Families,

We have certainly had a busy couple of weeks. All our Year 3 students have been working really hard and have adapted positively to some new changes to our learning program. We have seen our students take on these new changes with Zest and we hope that they have been excited to share their learning with you.

Literacy 

In Literacy, we have been covering many different areas including, phonemic awareness, spelling, morphology, comprehension and literature as well as creating texts. Our spelling focus has been learning common consonant digraphs such as; sh, th, ch, ng and learning which ones to use when spelling words. We have just completed an induction to morphology where our students learn about morphemes, base words, prefix and suffixes. We have now started to change the meaning of words by adding a prefix or suffix to them. During comprehension and literature students have been working on making deep text to self and text to text connections. We have been exploring these connections through various fictional, historical and digital texts. When creating texts students have been learning about correct sentence structure, tense and punctuation. Students now understand that a sentence should include a subject as well as predicate and know that the predicate must contain a verb.

Numeracy

In Numeracy, students have been working on recalling multiplication facts of two, five, ten and three. We have explicitly taught different strategies to solve multiplication sums. These include using number sequences, repeated addition and arrays. Students have enjoyed learning multiplication through our new method of ‘explicit direct instruction’ and like how the lessons are interactive, with students responding to questions using mini whiteboards as well as discussing answers with a partner. We have also focused on collecting, interpreting and comparing data. Students have learnt how to show data in various ways and can answer questions based on a data set.

History

In History, we have been learning about the early colonisation of Australia. Students discovered who the First Australians were, how they lived and why it is important that we do an ‘Acknowledgement of Country’. We are also learning about the First Fleet. Students now understand who was on ship, how and why they came to Australia and what happened when they arrived here. We are now starting to explore the early effects of European settlement.