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.

What do paper planes have to do with Maths?

This week, Year 3 are making and throwing paper planes - all for a mathematical purpose.  There is a lot of Maths that we can do with our paper planes.  Here are a few things we will be exploring:

Measurement
We are learning to accurately measure distances in centimetres and metres (and perhaps even millimetres!) using trundle wheels and tape measures.

Data
Our measurements will give us a great set of data to analyse, ask questions about and make comparisons with.

Number operations
Can we find the difference between two distances?  What would be the total distance flown by all the planes in our group?  What if the plane flew three times as far?  What if the plane flew a quarter of the distance?

Fractions and Decimals
If we only record the distance in metres, then we need to use decimals to show the distance accurately.

Here are some photos of some of the work that we've done this week: