Australian Curriculum Overview
English
In Year 3, students experience learning in familiar contexts and a range of contexts that relate to study in other areas of the curriculum. They interact with peers and teachers from other classes and schools in a range of face-to-face and online/virtual environments. Students engage with a variety of texts for enjoyment. They listen to, read, view and interpret spoken, written and multimodal texts in which the primary purpose is aesthetic, as well as texts designed to inform and persuade. These encompass traditional oral texts including Aboriginal stories, picture books, various types of print and digital texts, simple chapter books, rhyming verse, poetry, non-fiction, film, multimodal texts, dramatic performances and texts used by students as models for constructing their own work.
Mathematics
Understanding includes connecting number representations with number sequences, partitioning and combining numbers flexibly, representing unit fractions, using appropriate language to communicate times, and identifying environmental symmetry. Fluency includes recalling multiplication facts, using familiar metric units to order and compare objects, identifying and describing outcomes of chance experiments, interpreting maps and communicating positions. Problem Solving includes formulating and modelling authentic situations involving planning methods of data collection and representation, making models of three-dimensional objects and using number properties to continue number patterns. Reasoning includes using generalising from number properties and results of calculations, comparing angles and creating and interpreting variations in the results of data collections and data displays.
Science
In Year 3, students observe heat and its effects on solids and liquids and begin to develop an understanding of energy flows through simple systems. In observing day and night, they develop an appreciation of regular and predictable cycles. Students order their observations by grouping and classifying; in classifying things as living or non-living they begin to recognise that classifications are not always easy to define or apply. They begin to quantify their observations to enable comparison, and learn more sophisticated ways of identifying and representing relationships, including the use of tables and graphs to identify trends. They use their understanding of relationships between components of simple systems to make predictions.
HASS
The Year 3 curriculum focuses on the diversity of people and places in their local community and beyond, and how people participate in their communities. Students study how places are represented geographically and how communities express themselves culturally and through civic participation. Opportunities are provided to learn about diversity within their community, including the Country/Place of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, and about other communities in Australia and neighbouring countries. Students compare the climates, settlement patterns and population characteristics of places, and how these affect communities, past and present. Students examine how individuals and groups celebrate and contribute to communities in the past and present, through establishing and following rules, decision-making, participation and commemoration.
Health and Physical Education
The Year 3 and 4 curriculum further develops students' knowledge, understanding and skills in relation to their health, wellbeing, safety and participation in physical activity. In these years, students begin to explore personal and social factors that support and contribute to their identities and emotional responses in varying situations. They also develop a further understanding of how their bodies grow and change as they get older.
The content explores knowledge, understanding and skills that supports students to build and maintain respectful relationships, make health-enhancing and safe decisions, and interpret health messages from different sources to take action to enhance their own health and wellbeing.