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

This half term...Summer 1 (April - May 2024)

English - Initially the children will be completing their PHSE based work on writing instructions. This is based on the book 'My Strong Mind' and makes for an informal guide on how to build mental resilience and strength. This will tie in with a PHSE mini topic for this half term which the children will be asked to complete (see later!). They will then use their science learning to write a non-chronological report on the bones and muscles in the body. This will involve the children developing their research skills (which is always a very difficult skill!) and using the correct features of a non-fiction text. Whilst all this is going on, the children will have been developing their geographical knowledge of the local area, and will then be able to use this to produce a persuasive leaflet to attract people to visit Leigh. SO much to do in not so much time! Grammar and punctuation focuses are headings/subheadings, irregular past tense verbs, identifying trickier prepositions such as 'for' and 'to', punctuating speech correctly and main & subordinate clauses.

Our reading skills lessons will support the children's knowledge gathering across the curriculum covering topics such as the human body, rural and urban areas as well as some poetry. In particular they will focus on the VIPERS skill of summarising and sequencing, as well as skimming and scanning.

Our class reader for this half term will be The Creakers, in addition to a selection of PHSE texts to support the children's learning across the curriculum.

Spellings – the children will be ensuring that they spell words they have already learnt correctly including suffixes, plurals and contractions. We will also practise strategies such as breaking words down into syllables to help us to spell longer words. As always, we will also focus on the Year 3 statutory word lists.

Maths-  Once we have completed multiplication and division (almost there!), the children will move onto Length and Perimeter. This is well timed as later in the half term they will need to use their measuring skills to complete a scientific investigation that they plan! The trickiest part of length is understanding equivalence - how many mm in a cm, how many cm in a m... They will use place value in measures to compare, add and subtract. The children will then once again apply their ever growing times tables facts to fractions. Using lots of equipment and diagrams to develop their knowledge, they will begin to understand how to compare fractions, some of the terminology such as 'numerator' and 'denominator', as well as the fact that fractions are part of a whole number. 

Science - The children will complete the second half of their 'animals, including humans' unit. Having already discovered about balanced diets, they now look at our skeletons and what its job is. The children also find out how we move using our muscles and that some animals have skeletons outside their body - or no skeleton at all! The class will have a very exciting visit from Curious Critters who will introduce them to some wonderful creatures and help secure their understanding of exo and endoskeletons. In addition, we will have a radiographer in class to help our bones learning! The children will apply their learning in English and use their maths skills to find out if the person with the longest legs can jump the farthest!  

Geography & History - For the entire Summer Term, geography and history run closely together. Focusing on the local area, we begin to understand the processes of settlement and change. Once we understand where Leigh is in relation to the world, country, county and close by towns, we look at what is special about our town - why would someone want to visit? This feeds into our English work to create a leaflet about #visitleigh. Using fieldwork skills, the children will go on a local walk, creating sketch maps and looking for particular things such as areas that might need improvement, areas that we would want to tell someone about. We will look at how the area has changed more recently, and within the last century. When we begin to think about why this might be in Summer 2, we then move on to more historical skills. It is a really great topic to help the children understand how their local area came to be as it is today!

Computing - In this half term we learn about emailing - what is an email? What is it used for? The children learn how to send an email, including adding a subject, and then how to create an email adding an attachment. There is also a focus on online safety here, helping the children to understand when an email may not be genuine, how to use words kindly within communications and looking at cyber bullying. 

Design & Technology – For their mechanism unit, Year 3 will design a make a functional ferris wheel during this half term. They will learn how components fit together so that the structure stands freely, but the wheel turns.

French - Learning all about Transport! Throughout this unit of work the children will learn about cognates and near cognates, before changing some simple phrase structures to be able to talk simply about transport. They will ask and answer questions about pictures and describe a French journey. In addition, they will create a survey and present what they find. Tres bien! 

Music - Gospel! The children will learn a variety of gospel songs and about the history of these songs. The children will be taught how to focus on diction, melodic shape, dynamics and accuracy of pitch. They will be shown the correct posture for singing when standing or sitting and how to follow a conductor. The children will think about how to perform for an audience and how to tell the story through their singing.

RE – What kind of world did a Jesus want? - In this unit, the children will find out about Jesus calling his disciples and how Christians today try to be ‘fishers of men’. They will discover what the Gospel is and look at stories in the Gospel that tell of the kind of world that Jesus wanted. The class will also think about how Churches help to make the world as Jesus wished, how their activities and communities follow Jesus’ teachings and how these show examples of love.

PSHE - Heartsmart  will follow 'Fake is a Mistake' which encourages the children to be their true selves and see the value in who they truly are. This links in well with their online safety learning this half term regarding fake emails and being aware of 'fakeness' on social media platforms. 

PATHS -During our PATHS lessons this half term we will be spending lots of time finding out about the Control Signals. This is a strategy that we will learn to help us to begin to develop our self control. Using the ‘red’ signal, we will learn to stop, take a breath and say our problem. Calming down is a skill which needs to be developed in young children but one which is very important for becoming good problem solvers when our emotions might be getting the better of us.

PE - Our School Games Value is HONESTY

This complements the Heartsmart theme of 'Fake is a Mistake' which teaches the children to be proud of who they are and to communicate truths bravely. Visit the website www.heartsmartprimary.com for more information on what Heartsmart is all about.

Athletics - in preparation for our sports day next half term, the children will begin to learn about the techniques of sprinting, including agility turns in their sprinting relays too! They will learn the correct technique for hurdling aswell as jumping for height and distance. Finally they will practise throwing events including javelin, shot put and target throws. They will also hopefully sneak a little time to complete their gymnastics movement unit.

Spring Term 2 NEWS!

It was a busy one! The children finally managed to visit the Dojo shop to trade in their hard earned Dojo Points….although lots of them chose to save save save for a bigger reward! What a great example of life skills! The class took part in the whole school personal best day - those who are in Mort House were declared winners this time! We also took part in World Book Day celebrations and entered the ‘Decorate a toilet roll’ competition! We had some great entries! We also enjoyed a biscuit and a book in our pjs. It was also ‘Dress Up Funny For Money’ day for Comic Relief - we had some amazing funniness! The children really made us smile. Year 3 showed some great learning this half term, particularly with their quick progress with forwards and backwards rolls, and with their super Scratch skills! We’ve learned lots, but lots more to come in Summer term!!

Spring Term 1 NEWS!

It feels like we’ve crammed lots and lots of learning into this half term! Some of us have begun to turn our heatmaps green on TTRS and received a lovely green certificate! It’s definitely inspired others to practise to ‘go green’ too! We had some really interesting outdoor PE lessons - fewer than we’d like thanks to the weather - but we have finally completed our outdoor adventurous activities lesson and absolutely loved lots of opportunities this half term to develop our teamwork skills. We used them in Heart Smart and within some collaborative computing work too. We will continue to practise with an exciting event coming up in summer 2! We tried to keep active in the classroom with lots of active blasts, wet play games and supermovers to help our maths! That was on top of hip hop dancing in PE! We have also begun our new PATHS learning, helping us to recognise what we are feeling and to label them, so that we can then problem solve to begin to feel more comfortable feelings. During RE, one of our Muslim parents came to class to talk all about her faith. We loved this and asked really great questions! The whole class achieved a collective 3000 dojos and so chose a movie afternoon as a reward!

Autumn Term 2 NEWS!

In Autumn 2 we were so very busy! Not only did we have all our work to complete but we also had to celebrate Christmas! We created calendars, cards, ornaments and danced the afternoon away at our Christmas disco in all of our sparkles! Year 3 blew everyone away with their recorder rendition of jingle bells in the Christmas Service at church. We even managed to fit in a Santa Dash thanks to our Sports Ambassadors!

Before all that though, the class had worked really hard, especially in maths, to try to master written methods for addition and subtraction. We will need to continue with this regularly during spring but hopefully our concrete equipment has helped to give us good grounding. In English, the class wrote some beautiful Remembrance poems and narratives and proudly shared them on our Remembrance worship.

We were budding scientists, investigating magnets and all their ‘super’ powers, asking some really great questions and suggesting answers to them. The class enjoyed learning about the significance of Noah’s rainbow in the Bible, and how this applies to our lives now; the importance of promises. This was reflected in some beaded rainbow bracelets which the class as a reminder of promises we make.

Through developing dodgeball skills, some of the class are now set to attend the local competition, but we all worked hard to master the rules and skills for this great game! On top of all that, we also tried to travel to school actively at least once a week to earn December’s badge. It’s no wonder we were ready for a rest!

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!