Grade 3 Term 2 Curriculum News 2021
Grade 3 Term 2 Curriculum News 2021
This Term Newsletter will provide you with information about your children’s upcoming teaching and learning experiences in the new term. To find out what other year levels are doing, please refer to the school’s website. There is also plenty of additional information provided via Compass throughout the school year, so please make a point of touching base regularly.
GENERAL
Can you believe it is Term Two already? The Grade 3s have been working hard in Term One and are doing a fantastic job at developing their independence and resilience. We have appreciated the support parents & guardians have given students in order to encourage this with their children as well. We ask for this continued support in Term Two to ensure students are completing a minimum of 80 minutes of home reading and 40 minutes of Maths each week, then also handing homework tasks in on time. We greatly appreciate the donation of tissues to our classrooms and if your child is yet to bring in a box, we would appreciate this donation at the start of Term Two.
LITERACY
This term, we will be developing the student’s comprehension strategies of predicting, activating prior knowledge, determining importance to summarise, making connections, critiquing, analysing, synthesising, questioning, visualising and inferring. We will continue to emphasise the importance of selecting ‘Just Right’ books to enable them to practice these strategies. Their 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.
When reading a new book, encourage your child to make predictions before, during and after reading.
Check their reading comprehension by asking them to visualise and describe the setting, characters or their actions.
Encourage your child to point out unknown words. Encourage them to read around the word, or use text clues to figure out its meaning.
Support your child to ask questions about the text and author.
Encourage them to summarise or retell what has occurred in the book.
Encourage your child to read a balance of fiction and non-fiction.
Discuss the characters. Ask who was their favourite? Why?
Ask them whether they enjoyed the book.
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. We will continue to emphasise the importance of using our Writer’s Notebooks to develop and stretch our ideas. Students will also begin to explore the 6+1 Traits of Writing which includes organisation, voice, word choice, fluency, conventions, ideas and presentation. We will explore how authors use these to ensure their writing makes sense and interests their target audience. We encourage students to find authentic purposes for their writing and would appreciate parents supporting these endeavors at home as well.
A reminder that the following resources are available for home reading support:
Epic: https://www.getepic.com/ Your child’s teacher will have sent home your class Epic code.
Sunshine online – Username: LLPS3212 Password: LLPS3212
NUMERACY
In Mathematics this term, the children will learn about a range of concepts, skills and strategies with a specific focus on Measurement. They 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 learn these facts at home in addition to their homework. Families can also support at home by encouraging your child to play games involving counting and number facts.
A reminder that the following resources are available for home reading support:
Hit the Button: https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button
Essential Assessment: https://www.essentialassessment.com.au/ Your child’s teacher will have sent home the log in details for this, if it has been misplaced, please email your child’s teacher.
INQUIRY
During Term 2, students in Grade 3 will be working collaboratively on our topic, ‘The Arrival’. As part of this unit, students will:
- Identify and explain the causes and effects of European settlement and exploration
- Investigate stories of the First Fleet, including causes and reasons for the journey, who travelled to Australia, and their experiences and perspectives following arrival.
- The nature of contact between Aboriginal peoples, and the effects of these interactions
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.
NAPLAN
NAPLAN testing will occur in Week Four on the 11th, 12th, and 13th of May.
We look forward to continuing the connection between school and home in Term Two. 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.