Yr3 Curriculum Update – 29/11/19
Working together to achieve success for every child
Year 3
Working together to achieve success for every child.
Curriculum Update 29/11/2019
Welcome to our 5th edition!
In each update, the Year 3 Team will bring you snapshots of what your children in Year Three have been up to every 2 weeks. You will see a variety of learning experiences exemplifying learning which is fun, exciting, challenging, innovative and/or creative…and whatever they are, we know that your child has worked really hard to get there and should you have the chance, you may want to share this newsletter with your child to find out the juicy details and discuss the great learning he/she have been doing!
Transdisciplinary Learning – It’s all connected!
Transdisciplinary theme:
How We Organise Ourselves
central idea:
The food we buy goes through a process of change before we eat it.
Lines of inquiry:
- Where our food comes from (form)
- Processes food goes through (change)
- People and systems involved in food production and distribution (connection)
We have been thinking carefully about being internationally minded as we focus on what it means to be an inquirer (one of the 10 Learner Profile Attributes of IB schools). As inquirers, we ask questions which provide us with the opportunities to research, observe and be curious about our world.
The students have been observing details on food packages and asking questions such as, which food has the most sugar? Why does Hong Kong need to get food from so far away? Where is San Francisco on the world map?
Being inquirers by finding out where in the world food comes from by using Atlas’, books and maps.
Asking the question, what information can we find out from food packages?
This week it was the turn of other classes to experience the effort behind juicing as one of the processes food goes through! We measured the result of all that squeezing! We described the sweet-sour and completely delicious taste of fresh orange juice and compared it with packaged juice. We wondered, Why does it taste different? Why does the ingredient list contain added colour and sugar?
Some classes have enjoyed getting their hands very sticky as they learn how to make bread. In some other classes, there’s been plenty of baking delicious Mug Cakes (find the recipe below in the Home Learning section!).
Literacy
We have continued to link our Unit of Inquiry with reading and writing, speaking and listening. We are also looking closely at the writing process and zooming in on sentence writing.
Learning about adjectives to help make our sentences better!
As a way to say goodbye to Jensen, in 3I, we wrote him letters to wish him luck in this new and exciting chapter in his life!
Maths
Our exploration into Place Value, the Base 10 system and problem solving has continued as children gain confidence in using the materials, recording their thinking, reading and ordering numbers.
We have continued to consolidate our understanding of Place value by using materials. We are also reminding ourselves to persevere and try many different strategies when solving problems. A wonderful book which illustrates this is Yobi Kamada’s, ‘What do you do with a Problem?” There are many challenging maths tasks such as The Deca Tree, available on https://nrich.maths.org/
Some Year 3 buddy classes from Year 6 have been showing the children about Micro Bits and how they can code their names digitally, answer questions and even play games like Rock, Paper, Scissors!
We need your help
For our food unit, we would like to gather empty and washed food containers for children to look at and gather information.
If you have any spare cardboard, cereal boxes or small containers that we can use in our junk modelling area, we would love it if they could be brought to school.
Please note to only bring in items that are clean and stain free, as the children will be using their creativity to make things with these objects.
Reminders
A few key reminders for students and parents:
- Please remind your child to pack his/her hat for school each day, as children who do not bring their hat will not be allowed to take part in snack or lunch play.
- There are extreme peanut allergies in Year 3, so please make sure your child does not bring nuts to school or eat peanut butter or nutella for breakfast before he/she heads to school.
- Please remind your child to pack his/her own cutlery as we do not provide extra sets of cutlery at school.
- Your child this week have home readers to read at home daily for up to 5-10 minutes. Please let your child’s class teacher know if the level is too hard for your child.
- Your child’s weekly timetable have been placed in their school diaries, should you have questions around the days and times they should wear their PE uniform to school.
- School Bag: Please ensure your child has a backpack for school, not a wheelie bag. Bags with wheels are not safe for our stairs and cause trip hazards for others;
- Shoes: Black shoes with school uniform or white shoes with sports uniform. Please do not send your child with shoes that are a bit black and a bit white.
- Jewellery: Many children coming with necklaces, wrist bands and other adornments. The only jewellery permitted is a non wifi watch, and religious adornments that are to be worn inside the uniform.
Key dates for the Diary
Friday 29 November Y1-3 Assembly (Y2 focus)
Monday, 2nd December 3L Farm Visit
Tuesday, 3rd December 3A Farm Visit
Wednesday, 4th December 3K Farm Visit
Monday, 9th December 3I Farm Visit
Wednesday, 11th December 3J Farm Visit
Friday 6 December Whole school assembly
Friday 13 December Last day of term – Half day (finish at 12 pm)
16 December – 3 January Term Break
Monday 6 January First day of Term 2
Home learning
Some suggestions to support the learning taking place in school are:
- Help shop for and prepare a healthy breakfast.
- As a special treat, use the recipe to bake a Mug Cake! Can you add your own ideas? How about grated chocolate?
(‘Tasty’ App – Mug Cakes)
- Numbers in cooking! What are the different units of measures we use? What tools do we use to measure with?
