Grade 3 Newsletter - Term 3

Dear Parents,

This Term Newsletter will provide you with information about your child’s upcoming teaching and learning experiences in the new term. There is also plenty of additional information provided via Compass throughout the school year, so please make a point of touching base regularly.

GENERAL

Wow! Halfway through the year already. The Grade 3 team would like to share their appreciation for all your support and hard work for the year so far. A friendly reminder that if your child is displaying cold and flu symptoms, that they will need to stay at home until feeling better.

LITERACY

This term, we will continue to link reading with writing by analysing different author’s texts (Roald Dahl being a favourite) to see what skills they use to influence their readers. We will also continue to emphasise the importance of selecting ‘Just Right’ books to enable them to practise the comprehension strategies as well as their personal reading goals. Student Reading Journals will continue to serve as a tool to track their individual goals and daily reading, while the Reading Response section will enable students to provide evidence of how they are working on our class learning focus.

DID YOU KNOW that a child who reads for 67.3 minutes a day will read a total of 4,733,000 words a year? This puts them in the 98th percentile rank! This includes any form of reading such as signs, books, notes etc. Whilst we do not expect Grade Three students to read for this amount of time, clearly the more they read, the better they will get!

In Writing, the students will continue to explore the Writer’s Workshop and emphasise the importance of using our Writer’s Notebooks to develop and stretch our ideas. Recently the Grade 3s have explored how to use a variety of vocabulary, including verbs, adjectives and adverbs, to improve their word choice and make their writing more descriptive and engaging. This term will be building on our knowledge of vocabulary and using it to create fluent sentences of a variety of lengths. We will continue to encourage students to find authentic purposes for their writing and would appreciate parents supporting these endeavours at home as well.

A reminder that the following resources are available for home reading support:

Epic: https://www.getepic.com/

Sunshine online: https://www.sunshineonline.com.au/

Contact your child’s teacher if you require logins to be sent home again.

NUMERACY

In Mathematics this term, the children will learn about a range of concepts, skills and strategies with a specific focus on Multiplication, Division and Fractions. They will be encouraged to use their problem-solving strategies to build a toolbelt of skills to help them solve a range of mathematical problems. Students will also continue to focus on recalling basic number facts quickly and accurately (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). It would be appreciated if you could help your child to practise these facts at home as well as playing games which involve counting and number facts.

A reminder that the following resource is available for home support:

Hit the Button: https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button

INQUIRY

During Term 3, students in Grade 3 will be working collaboratively on our topic, ‘The Great Safari’. As part of this unit, students will develop the following understandings:

• Continents and countries below the equator are part of the Southern Hemisphere

• Vegetation can look different and have important roles within environments – habitats, collect rainfall, etc

• There are a range of different climates within the Southern Hemisphere (4 main types: tropical, Arid, temperate, polar)

• Types of vegetation and animals are native to those environments and rely on the climate to survive

• Natural environments are made up of flora, fauna and major natural features/landmarks

At the end of this topic, students will make an informative resource to educate Grade 3/4 students about climates, environments and animals in the Southern Hemisphere.

DEVICES

A reminder that Department of Education policy stipulates that phones, watches or other devices with communicative ability cannot be carried by students while on the school premises during school hours, without Principal approval. For further details please refer to the policy documents on Compass and the Lara Lake PS website.

We look forward to continuing the connection between school and home. Should you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact your child’s teacher. Compass continues to be our main form of communication. Alternatively, you can contact the office directly for more urgent matters. We ask that if you need to speak with your child’s teacher, that you organise a phone call at a mutually appropriate time. The team will endeavour to reply to any queries as soon as possible.

The Grade Three Team.

Each year level team has provided their families with a detailed newsletter such as this. If you are interested in reading about all the exciting things happening across the rest of the school, these can be accessed online at our school website from early next week.