Our Year 3 Class

A very warm welcome to our Year 3 class page.  In Year 3 the children are new to the juniors and sometimes a little nervous, so they need to spend time adjusting to new routines and expectations. The children enjoy the opportunity to develop their skills further and generally settle in really quickly to Key Stage 2. They become confident working both independently and in groups, seeing the huge benefits of sharing their ideas and learning. They especially enjoy Wednesdays because they get to go swimming!     

Our Year 3 Class 2023-2024

Class Information

Who's Who

Mrs Evans- Year 3 Teacher

Miss Keay- Teaching Assistant

Things to remember

Please remember that homework is due in by WEDNESDAY each week.

P.E. lessons - PE will be on a Monday and a Friday. The children will need to come to school in their full PE kits.

Please remember to write your child's name on all of their uniform and sports kits to avoid confusion within class.

It is important that children read regularly at home, we appreciate that it may not always be possible but encourage you to do so. The reading record is now to be sent through on Seesaw, with the Reading Record folder tagged. We ask for one video every few weeks to be sent as we can give feedback on how you can help your child improve at home. 

This half term...... Autumn Term 2 (October-December 2023)

Over the next half term we will remain in Extreme Earth! 

English The children will continue to follow The Write Stuff approach to our writing. This helps the writing process through The Writing Rainbow, teaching the children how to build sentences using different elements of writing and grammar. Writing is demonstrated and modelled, with rich experience days to support comprehension of their genre. 

This half term, the children will begin by celebrating Remembrance, writing their own poems using similes and alliteration. These are two key Boomtastics on the Writing Rainbow and are valuable writerly techniques! They will then use the lovely story of Flo of the Somme to learn about how dogs help in wars, and will write a short narrative from the perspective of Flo. The children will then use the fantastic book ‘The Street Beneath My Feet’ to support their writing of an explanation text about how mountains are formed. This provides great opportunities to link curriculum learning from both autumn Geography units. Finally, as our class text is George’s Marvellous Medicine, the children will write a short character description. Using grandma as a model, they will look to another Ronald Dahl favourite, The BFG, to describe one of the giants! 

Reading - The children will continue to develop their reading skills with a focus on retrieval and vocabulary. They will spend lots of time reviewing their comprehension questions and building their skills in how to find answers in a text using skimming and scanning skills. Texts will be linked across the curriculum, covering topics such as Mountains, Unsung War Heroes and Remembrance.  

Spellings - We continue to use follow the Read, Write Inc scheme for spelling. The children will develop their understanding of root words and word families by reviewing un- and in- prefixes before learning re- mis- and dis-. It is very important that Year 2 and Year 3 statutory words are practised at home. 

Mathematics- Place value and number will continue to be embedded through starter activities and homework as we move on to more difficult addition and subtraction. For this, teaching will follow the Power Maths scheme; we will add and subtract ones, tens and hundreds within 1000, but will be learning how to use column addition and subtraction. Encouraging children to share their methods at home is a great way to further their learning and will help you to support your child at home, particularly as many of the strategies are different from several years ago. We look forward to welcoming parents and carers to a maths workshop where the children can sit alongside their grown ups and show them how they 'do maths'. Children will be exposed to problems and reasoning daily. At home, you can support your child by counting across hundreds, in 1s, 5s or 10s as this often is needed when using number lines. Accessing Top Marks Daily 10 is also a simple and very effective way to support mental skills, and can be set to suit your child's ability. 

TT Rockstars remains a key resource for the children both in and out of school and will be set to match current abilities. Lots of children are still securing their 2s and 5s. Times tables will be tested once a week and children will be exposed to 3s and 4s through counting activities. This is the first step to learning a new times table.

Geography - This half term we find out all about mountains. We already know about volcanoes, earthquakes and how they all happen. Now we move onto how mountains are formed and a mountain's key features. The children will continue to develop their map skills by locating the world's seven summits and UK summits and what it's like to live on a mountain, specifically in The Himalayas!

Working cross-curricularly with English, Art this half term sees us learning how to sketch. Through shape spotting and seeing like an artist, the children will begin to develop their sketching skills using various materials including pencil and charcoal. Using the illustrations of Michael Morpurgo's beautiful story 'Poppies' as inspiration, they will practise pencil sketching skills aswell as shading, sketching poppies. They will create a final sketch of a war scene in the style of the book.

Science - Magnets As a stand alone unit, this is great for investigation and scientific working; the children love it! Beginning with exploring push and pull forces and friction, before moving onto investigate the non-contact force of magnetism. The children discover about a magnet's poles and how they behave and the kinds of materials that are magnetic. They consider some real life uses of magnets before applying their learning by designing a tool to reach something from far away.

PE - The School Games Value is SELF BELIEF which complements the Heart Smart theme of Don't Forget to Let Love In which teaches the children to value themselves and see that they are worthy of being loved. With close ties to RE learning and Christian values, Heartsmart will enable the children to consider their own well-being and reflect on how they feel inside about themselves.

Our Indoor PE this half term is dodgeball! This will build in the children’s priori learning of target games. Developing their ability to throw with accuracy, they will need to work on their game skills, remembering to follow rules fairly, develop simple tactics and try to catch the dodgeball. Lots to think about and it will certainly give them a challenge!

Outdoor PE - We meet Outdoor Adventurous Activities! This introduces the children to some basic orienteering, lots of teamwork and problem solving built around activities designed to encourage them to work together and plan strategies. 

RE - In this unit we ask ‘What is it like for someone to follow God? The children will find out lots about Noah. As one of The People of God, they will use this story to consider how people, now and then, try to live by God’s commands and make promises with him. The children try to make links between Noah’s story and how we live in the wider world today. For example, when do we make promises today? How can we keep our promises? What is the importance of a rainbow to Christians and Jews? It promises to be a really great unit of learning.

French - The children get all descriptive in this unit, recognising and naming colour words aswell as size and shape. They practise this vocabulary by giving and receiving instructions. They then apply it to a piece of artwork in the style of Matisse following French instructions. Finally, just in time for Christmas, they create and describe a festive picture!

Music - The children learn a range of African songs this half term, using these as a medium through which to match pitch, sing in tune, enunciate and sing in a group. They also are challenged with following the conductor! This vocal unit will help the children to learn how to sit and stand correctly when they sing and, all importantly, warm up their voices!

Heartsmart- 'Don't Forget to let Love In'

Visit the website www.heartsmartprimary.com for more information on what Heartsmart is all about.

Well Being Wednesday - We continue to meet the flock! These are a bunch of friendly birds including Roger the Routine Rooster and Sienna the Serene Swan. Through stories and reflection, and with the help of a little egg, these birds teach the children some little words of wisdom to help them to become thoughtful, considerate and balanced little people.

Autumn Term 1 NEWS!

During Autumn 1 we learned all the routines of KS2! The children have settled in superbly to junior life and have blossomed into their new learning environment. The children have brought a wonderful attitude to learning and I am very excited to see where this will take them. We have had some particularly fun times including the Friends of School Disco and Break the Rules Day….we had the craziest hair! We have had a focus on learning to coach each other in our learning. The children have had several opportunities to develop their peer coaching skills, including in maths and science and are beginning to develop this skill well.

This year we have begun a new RE scheme which has some fabulous learning opportunities. The children have revisited the Creation story and thought about the the wonder of the Earth and why it is described as ‘very good’. We considered if being a Christian makes us anymore in awe of the Earth. They also the considered where sin came from, who first got it wrong and how do we fix it as Christians. Within DT, the children learned about Jewish Sukkahs and designed, built and evaluated their huts! They were amazing as you can see in the photos. Lots of thought went into creating strong and stable structures!

Much of our maths learning has challenged us, supported by practical equipment and peer talk. There have been lots of problems that we have tried to reason through. Our writing, geography and science were all linked following the theme of ‘Extreme Earth’. We wrote about a flood, learned about volcanoes and earthquakes and all about rocks and how they are made. We also got practical in computing and made networks out of our bodies! During PE, the children really developed their invasion games skills, improving hugely on marking and moving into space. I was very impressed! We still have some teamwork skills to develop but their game play was fantastic. We also tried our hand at rhythmic gymnastics focusing on balancing with control and holding shapes.

We have had a fantastic half term! We can’t wait for the next one!