Year 3 – 4

Our Year 3-4 Unit currently has two classes, with each class supported by a member of our Education Support Staff.

The English curriculum aims to ensure that students:

• learn to listen to, read, view, speak, write, create and reflect on increasingly complex and sophisticated spoken, written and multimodal texts across a growing range of contexts with accuracy, fluency and purpose
• appreciate, enjoy and use the English language in all its variations and develop a sense of its richness and power to evoke feelings, convey information, form ideas, facilitate interaction with others, entertain, persuade and argue
• understand how Standard Australian English works in its spoken and written forms and in combination with non-linguistic forms of communication to create meaning
• develop interest and skills in inquiring into aesthetic aspects of texts, and develop an informed appreciation of literature

Students are involved in a daily structured 2 hour Literacy block which includes a wide variety of engaging experiences to ensure achievement in Reading, Writing, Spelling and Speaking and Listening.  At Rutherglen PS we focus on the 6 + 1 Traits of Writing which allows teachers to pinpoint student’s strengths and goals for their writing in the elements of ideas, organisation, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation, and from this enable targeted teaching at student’s point of need.  Our approach enables teachers to support and encourage students to be confident and creative with their writing.

The focus in reading is developing skills which support student’s development of effective reading and comprehension strategies. In gaining meaning from texts, readers at Rutherglen Primary School are taught that effective readers combine what they know about the world (their background knowledge) with the information and details from the text, the grammatical structure in which the text is written, and the way spoken language relates to the letters, words, visual elements, and symbols on page.  Through our reading approaches student’s ability to comprehend, interpret, analyse, respond and interact with a variety of literary sources is developed.  Students are supported to increase their reading stamina during daily independent reading time of ‘just right’ texts.  This time enables teachers to conference with students to identify goals to support their reading progress.

Our Mathematics programs are engaging, fun and based in real life contexts. All students work across the three strands of Mathematics – Number, Measurement and Geometry, and Statistics and Probability. Our Maths programs are planned and taught at point of need, through ongoing data collection by the classroom and support teachers. This enables students to be supported to work mathematically, to build their understanding, fluency and reasoning, whilst being moved through these capabilities at their own pace.

There is a strong focus on the link between concrete materials and numeracy concepts and many learning experiences involve games and problem-solving opportunities that help make maths meaningful and connected to real-life learning.

Our Year 3-4 classes attend a one hour Art, STEM, P.E and French lesson on a weekly basis with our specialist teachers.

Our 3-4 Unit also engages in the following programs and learning opportunities:

• A two week Transition Program in November & December of each year
• An extensive and integrated cooking and gardening program
• A bank of iPads, 1-1 laptops for timetabled ICT lessons and core classroom work  and a number of classroom computers
• An artist in residence program and other incursions linked to the integrated learning unit
• Yearly camp experience of 3 days linked to the integrated learning unit