Grade 3

What’s Happening in Term 4 

Reading

During term four, students will learn to make a range of text connections when reading. With the support of teacher modelling and questioning, students will develop their ability to explain how text connections improve their understanding. In guided reading groups and independently, they will learn to analyse authors’ craft and purpose. Through applying the skills of inferring, summarising and connecting information across sections of text, students will learn to analyse choices made by the author and deepen their understanding of an author’s message. An important focus in guided reading groups will be to teach students that successful cooperation with others depends on them listening to and contributing to discussions with their peers. Throughout the term, teachers will support students to express their opinion, share ideas and reflections, and respond to each other’s questions.

Writing

This term students are revisiting descriptive writing, narratives and information reports. With explicit teacher instruction and modelling, students will learn to follow the writing process of planning, drafting, editing, revising and publishing to improve their craft. They will use picture prompts to develop interesting ideas and will plan and write stories with a problem and successful resolution. A key focus will be to write grammatically correct sentences, including descriptive language to engage readers and add detail to their writing. Later in the term, students will revisit the genre of information texts to consolidate how to paraphrase facts and compose interesting reports. They will publish their writing and will have the opportunity to share their learning in a gallery walk.

Maths

During term four, students will be learning about shape and symmetry, reconnecting to multiplication and division, and focusing on fractions and financial maths. They will learn about shape features and investigate a range of 2D and 3D shapes. Students will learn about symmetry and will be encouraged to find the lines of symmetry in a variety of shapes and objects. For multiplication and division, they will be making and drawing arrays, and using their multiplication knowledge to support their understanding of equal parts, sharing and division. During the fractions unit, our focus will be partitioning areas, lengths and collections, locating fractions on a number line and working with halves, thirds, quarters and fifths. At the end of the term, students will use concrete materials such as play money to help them count and calculate change, and to represent dollar amounts in different ways.

Inquiry
Our big question for inquiry this term is, ‘How are the actions of humans impacting living things and the environment?’. Students will learn about the different factors that impact Australian ecosystems. Through knowledge construction, they will discover how and why some of our native animals are becoming listed as endangered species. Working with real-world issues, they will actively identify challenges and authentic needs of the environment. With a focus on pollution and climate change, students will problem solve and create action plans with the goal of reducing human impact.