Christ Church C.E. Primary School

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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 Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The children will need to come to school in their full PE kits, and bring their swimming kit on Wednesdays too!

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.... Spring Term 2 (February-March 2024)

With only 5 weeks, we have no doubt that this half term will be as full as the last! 

English - The children will spend the first weeks on poetry, using a selection of Michael Rosen's poetry including The Sound Collector. They will, as always, use the Writing Rainbow to write their own versions both independently and in groups. It's great fun and quite a fast moving set of writing. They will then use the book 'My Strong Mind' to write instructions on how to have a strong mind. We will use 'How to Wash a Woolly Mammoth' alongside this as both texts show instructions in a light-hearted and informal way which opens the children's eyes to different uses of writing. By the end of this half term, we hope to have increased the children's confidence with independent writing and the ability to use gathered vocabulary and the Writing Rainbow to plan their writing. They will also have ample opportunity to use the SPAG that they will learn each week.

SPAG focuses will be word families, word classes - in particular identifying whether a word is being used as a nouns or verb - sentence sense, adverbs of manner and time and sentence types.

Spellings will continue to work through the Year 3 statutory list of words as well as adding the suffixes -ation, -ion and -ian.

Reading skills will feed into both our science and history topics to give the children a better knowledge base to then apply the topic-based skills. We will focus on skimming and scanning, looking for key words in a question to help us to find an answer in a text, and begin to look at summary skills.

Our class reader is The Snow Girl by Sophie Anderson. 


Maths-  
While the children continue to secure their 3, 4 and 8 times tables, we move on to using related calculations to help us to find answers to bigger questions. Then the children will learn to multiply 2 digit numbers by 1 digit numbers, using the process of exchange when needed. Some children will move on to using this as a written method, others will complete these using equipment or diagrams to support their learning. TTRockstars will help the children's recall of facts and weekly tests will continue. We will also continue to use written methods for addition and subtraction so that we don’t forget them, as well as our number bonds and times table tests!

     

Science & DT - Our focus this half term is Nutrition. This ties in really well with our DT topic 'Where in the World'. During both, the children will learn about a balanced diet, how to create balanced meals and what each food group does for our bodies. Alongside this, they will find out about seasonal foods in Britain, what types of foods we import and where from and how the rainbow colours of food give a clue to the nutrients they contain. Finally the children will make a rainbow veg tart, creating their own recipe and adding foods together. In science, we also look at animal diets to help us to understand that different animals need different foods to be healthy.

    

History - Vikings!! This is the first KS2 unit which works backwards from 1066. Currently the children know this year as the year William the Conqueror cam to the throne, but what was before that?! The children find out what the Vikings were like and why our opinion of them has changed – and why. They use their historical skills of questioning to find out about Vikings as craftsmen and evaluate how fair history has been towards them based on what evidence is now available. Their understanding of British history is extended in learning about where the Vikings came from, how much of Britain they invaded and why they came in the first place. 

     

RE – How do festivals and family life show what matters to Jews? 

Children will explore some Jewish beliefs about God, sin and forgiveness through creative and interactive lessons. They will understand what the festivals Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur mean, how Jews express the meanings through symbols, sounds and rituals. They will be able to make links between their beliefs and how they live and will be encouraged to question whether it is good for Jews to remember the past and look forward. This will be a lovely unit to expand the children’s understanding of other religions and compare against their last unit about Muslims and their faith.   
   

Computing - the class will understand more about coding and programming by 'Tinkering with Scratch'. Progressing from Scratch Junior, they use loops to create an animation, tell a story and program a simple game.    
    

Heartsmart- 'Don't Hold On To What's Wrong!'

This unit focuses on Forgiveness and learning how to process negative emotions, disappointment and hurt.

Don't hold on to what's wrong is about choosing to forgive, leaving the pointing finger in our pocket and accepting that we too need grace just as much as we give it away. Everyone makes mistakes. Don't demand perfection, instead celebrate progress, that's what loves does.

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

PE - School Games Value is RESPECT

Year 3 will begin their swimming lessons this half term! Some of us will be understandably a little nervous at this prospect, others will be more confident. This adventure will be as much a test of learning new routines and organising themselves, as the actual swimming!

Our second PE lesson in the week will be gymnastics. The children will progress their current skills in rolls, jumps, leaps, learn new skills around handstands and cartwheels and may even get to have a try on the vault!

 

French - After learning the number to twelve and how to say their age, the children will now progress to learning basic classroom instructions and the names for items in a school bag such a pencil, ruler and rubber. They will find out if these items are masculine or feminine in French and then they will be able to say a simple sentence to explain something they have or do not have in their bags!

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!