What's happening in Year 3 this week?

Religious Education

Learning intention: We are learning to understand how Jesus calls us to reach out and help others.
Success criteria: I can recount how the disciples were instructed to take the Good News to others in The Mission of the Twelve.

When reading this text, we have asked ourselves, "How did the disciples reach out to others?"  We have also reflected on times when people have reached out to us.

English

Learning intention: We are learning to write engaging imaginative texts.

Success criteria: I can make sentence level choices to engage the reader.  

We have read texts that make good use of simple, compound and complex sentences to help the reader visualise and to build up tension.  We've tried to use their strategies in their own writing on pirate themes (we are treasuring our learning this term!)

Maths

Learning intention: We are learning to order and describe numbers.

Success criteria: I can:

• identify numbers that are less than or greater than a number
• accurately arrange four-digit numbers in order
• use place value to describe four-digit numbers

Challenges this week included:  Choose a number. Write your own clues to another person to work out what number you have chosen.

• It is important that students can demonstrate in their clues their understanding of place value in the number

Inquiry Unit

We started our new inquiry, How are our lives shaped by the cycles of earth and space?  We ignited our learning by viewing this video and examining the changes that we saw in the sky.  We are now capturing our understanding of the sunrise in a digital visual presentation such as a slideshow.

Maths Parent Workshop

Last Monday we held a parent workshop at school about multiplicative thinking in Mathematics. Even if you weren't able to come along, you can still learn about multiplicative thinking by watching this video with material from the workshop. Take a look.

Student eBook of the Week

Parents, are you looking for something for your children to read?  Why not try this week's eBook, Billie B Brown: The Soccer Star?

The student eBook is provided by Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta's Learning Exchange, and can be downloaded and read online or in an eBook reader app.

We're Trying Something New

To make better use of our devices (eg Laptops, iPads) in Year 3, and take advantage of the ability they give us to work more efficiently and collaboratively, we're starting to use a tool called Google Classroom.

While we're not all Classroom expert yet, the students in Year 3 have taken to this tool very quickly over the past week.  They can access it online via an internet browser (such as Firefox, Safari or Chrome), or through the Classroom app.  It provides the students with a way of continuing their classroom learning at home or elsewhere.

Classroom provides us with a new way of keeping students informed of learning tasks, providing resources and materials to support learning, and for students to submit work and receive feedback.

Unfortunately Classroom doesn't have an easy way for parents to see a glimpse of their child's learning yet, but Google promises that they are working on it, and it will be available later in the year.  In the meantime, you can always ask your child to log in at home and give you a guided tour.

Design and Make Project

Dear Parents and Carers,

As you might already be aware, Year 3 is learning about materials, forces and heat as part of our inquiry unit this term. They will work over the rest of this term on designing and making a lunch box that requires them to apply and demonstrate their understanding of the scientific concepts we have explored so far.

By the end of this week, your child will have completed a plan of their lunch box and should be able to explain to you what they wish to make, the materials required, and why they have chosen to make the lunch box this particular way. We would appreciate your assistance in providing your child with the specific materials that they will need.

We will provide students with the following common materials and resources should they need them:

• A plain insulating filling (eg polar fleece)
• Glue and adhesive tapes
• Simple plastic containers (eg take away food containers) that could be used as a starting point to assemble materials around

We will also be trying to locate some other simple, low-cost materials, but cannot guarantee what we can source at this stage.

We are also encouraging sustainability in this project, so some students are thinking that they may be able to use materials from items at home that are no longer being used (eg old lunch bags). We have explained to all students that these items can only be used if you give them permission to do so.

The making stage of this project will begin next week.

Thank you for your support. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Homework Term 2 Week 6

Please make sure that you...

• Read for at least 15 minutes every night
• Use a text you have read in the past and improve the noun groups within it. Please re-write it, highlighting the nouns and adjectives you have used. Remember to pay close attention to word order. (opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin and material/location)
• There were three children who visited their grandma regularly. The eldest child visited every five days. The middle child visited every four days. The youngest child visited every three days. How many days would have to go by before they all visited their grandma on the same day?

Here's some more you can do...

• View this video about how the colour of a material can affect how much heat it absorbs

• Add a comment to the Google Classroom page, posting to a response a teacher has added

Homework Week 5

Year 3 Homework Term 2, Week 5 2016

Please tick off the tasks that you do this week

Please make sure that you...	Here’s some more you can do...
Read for at least 15 minutes every night Using the planning of noun groups from last week to write an imaginative story Time yourself completing everyday tasks. Record five tasks and how long they took you to do.	Visit physics4kids.com and record a definition of heat transfer, gravity and friction. Link it to an experiment we undertook last week in Science. You will also find the link on our blog http://stanthonysyear2.blogspot.com

Reading Log	Text Read
Monday
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Wednesday
Thursday
Parent Signature