Key Dates

Note these dates in your diaries! Reminders and further information will be provided throughout the term.

WEEK 3
August 5 Homeless Youth Casual Dress Day

WEEK 4
August 8 Pupil free day

WEEK 5
August 15 Imagine Me Body Safety Sessions for Students
August 18 Year 3 Assembly
August 19 Pyjama Day

WEEK 7

August 31 PFG Father's Day breakfast
August 31 Minimbah production - The Little Mermaid day 1
September 1 Minimbah production - The Little Mermaid day 2

WEEK 8

September 9 Mini Olympics

WEEK 9

September 13 Grandparents' Day
September 14 to 16 Year 3 / 4 Camp at The Ranch
September 16 Term 3 Concludes

TERM 4

October 4 Term 4 commences

Term 3 Unit of Inquiry: Role Models, thinking and behaviour

Central Idea: People’s choice of role models can influence their thinking and behaviour.

At the beginning of this term, we’ve explored people that the students look up to currently and analysed the character traits or attributes that make them positive role models. Our students have ranked the qualities according to how important they think they are at the beginning of our unit. To deepen our inquiry, we will explore a range of texts, in particular the Little People: Big Dreams book series, learning about key historical figures and the extraordinary feats of people who have faced significant challenges.

This is an opportunity for students to:

• develop reading skills
• determine the main ideas of texts
• discuss connecting themes
• how to skim and scan for key information and
• analyse the author’s purpose in writing these texts.

As the unit continues, we will explore the way role models can influence people, and how we can act as role models ourselves. Our students have become really interested in environmental issues lately, particularly in the amount of waste created as a society. Stay tuned for our young role models making a real impact.

Language

This term we’ll be exploring language through several lenses: how it can support and deepen our inquiry, as discussed above, and by inquiring into the idea that visual texts have the power to influence our thinking and behaviour. Once again, we see the concept of influence appear; a wonderful transdisciplinary which connects our language learning and our unit of inquiry. Throughout this unit, students will study visual texts, in particular advertising, to analyse and interpret the techniques used to influence us. We’ll look at how advertisers target different emotions, learn the language of visual texts (logo, symbol, foreground, background, and so on), and engage in the creation of our own visual texts.

We see a great opportunity to link this to our unit of inquiry, too, as students continue to think about how they may use visual texts to help make an impact in our school community. Alongside this, we will continue to engage in structured word inquiry; learning about how words work, utilising speaking and listening skills to discuss ideas and concepts and engaging in real opportunities for writing to further both our language and transdisciplinary inquiries.

Maths

To begin our term, we will be exploring the idea that by analysing and making rules for patterns, it is possible to make predictions. Patterns underpin all learning in mathematics and enable the development of fluency and understanding, which has the flow-on effect of deepening students' ability to problem solve.

Throughout this unit we’ll learn how we can express rules, create complex patterns, learn about the patterns we can find in multiplication and division and how these patterns can help us with multiplication and division. Once upon a time, learning the times tables was the ultimate goal of multiplication in primary school. Now, we have higher aspirations for students as mathematical thinkers!

That said, the recall of these multiplication facts continues to be important to develop fluency and understanding, and to enable progression towards more complex mathematical thinking and processes. Students are setting goals for their own learning of the ‘multiplication facts’ – developing accuracy and speed – whilst learning tips and tricks to help remember them, such as that the ‘4s’ are just double the ‘2s’, and the ‘8s’ are double the ‘4s’!

JAMES CLAPHAM
Year 4 classroom teacher