Welcome to Year 3!

Class Teachers:
       

Mr Cranstone and Mrs Hawley

Teaching Assistant:

Miss Hall

Mr Cranstone teaches Monday to Wednesday and Mrs Hawley teaches on Thursdays and Fridays.

Key Information

• PE Lessons: Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Please make sure that your child comes in with the appropriate kit at the start of each half-term and that each item is clearly labelled. PE kits will be sent home at the end of every half-term for washing, unless specified otherwise.

• Reading Records - Checked (and changed, if required) every Monday.

Children need to be reading every day for 20 minutes, writing comments for at least three of these. A minimum of one comment needs to be signed off by an adult each week. We suggest the adult-signed entry could be the last one before records are checked in school.

If your child finishes their book, please ensure this is clearly written in the record so that Miss Hall knows it needs changing.

If you would like to support with the development of your child's comprehension, please ask them questions about what they have read and discuss their answers with them - what did they learn/find out; how did they reach an answer; what led them to their conclusion?

Further information has been struck into the first pages of the record.

• Spelling - Our new approach.

Each week we will have a different spelling focus; for example, adding the -s suffix to root/base words ending with a y, or the /ow/ sound spelt 'ou'.

Each week, on a Monday, the children will be taught the week's focus rule. They will then complete an independent task on a Tuesday and have a revision session on a Wednesday. On Wednesdays, we will also mark the previous week's homework and your child will be sent home with the homework sheet for the current week.

The homework sheet will have a small copy of the week's words attached to it. This can be separated and kept at home to enable your child to regularly revisit previous weeks' words (this is essential to ensure the spelling rules/patterns are retained). For some children, some of these words will be highlighted (these are focus words, which we would like your child to focus on).

While completing the homework activities, please help your child to complete this task and ask them to explain their thinking to you. The sheet does not all have to be completed at once, meaning you could do a section a day/split it up if that would work best for you. Please feel free to leave any sections which feel too challenging and we can address these when we are marking.

For ease, we suggest homework be returned to school with children's reading records on a Monday; however, it is not required until Wednesday. Homework will be filed in school and retained after marking.

• Maths & Times-Tables - Please practise regularly.

Each week, a maths activity will be sent home that is related to the children's learning. Please support them in completing this but do encourage them to give it their best try independently beforehand.

At the end of Year 4, the children will complete the statutory assessment of their tables knowledge. By the end of Year 3, children are expected to be fluent with the following tables: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10.

We hope the children will also have started, or be confident with, the 6's and 9's by the time they move into Year 4.

In addition to their tables practise, we encourage all children to regularly revisit their number bonds to ensure they are remain secure.

AutumnTerm

Venture into prehistory with Year 3 this term... we're sure it's going to rock your world!

We will be diving into life in Britain from the Stone Age through to the Iron Age and exploring what life was like for our ancestors during this time. We will send Flat Stanley off on an exciting adventure in English, crawl (virtually, unfortunately) through a cave in France that is decorated with ancient artwork and even have a go at stepping into the shoes of a newspaper reporter. It's going to be an exciting, jam-packed term, so lace up those mammoth leather shoes... there's knowledge to hunt and gather!

Soyez excité! We are also going to start learning French, now that we are in KS2 - from phonics and simple greetings to a variety of animals. We will be exploring pronunciation and spelling and even spotting where and how this language is similar and different to our own. While learning about all of this, we will also investigate the variety of rocks and soils in science, and the intricacies of light and shadow, and will be analysing, imitating and deriving inspiration from the works of Paul Klee and an array of portrait artists in Art. In computing, we will learn about computer systems, networks and databases, and even have a go at making our own stop animations – maybe even taking some inspiration from our learning across the curriculum, and in music we will be introduced to playing the recorder. To deepen our thinking further, in RE we will also be considering Christian beliefs surrounding God as a Creator.

It really is going to be a marble-ous term, filled to the brim with knowledge and experiences, so make sure your minds are as sharp as your microliths and let's dive in!