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 Term 2 (June-July 2024)

English - For our final half term in Year 3, the children will produce a narrative based on the Literacy Shed film clip ‘Soar’. They will use the Writing Rainbow to bring together all their learning to write a setting description before telling the story of a young would-be pilot. When writing they will specifically think about choosing vocabulary to have an effect on the reader. This is a great opportunity for them to showcase their writing talents! We will then move on to non-fiction where we will produce an explanation text about how plants protect themselves. The children will therefore return to the use of subheadings and the use of appropriate word choice to create the correct tone for the writing. There will also be opportunity to use their summarising reading skills to create a storyboard for a Film Trailer in our Computing unit. In reading skills, as well as focusing specifically on summarising and inference skills, we will be focusing on longer texts, helping to build the children's stamina and skills at skimming and scanning to find the right part of a text to search for an answer. We will also share some lovely books relating to our science topi, including Bloom and, The Flower and The Tin Forest. The latter two, as largely picture books, will support our inference skills work.

For spellings we will continue to practise key words as well as return to some spelling rules that we haven’t yet mastered, including spellings of some contractions and homophones. 

Maths - Fractions, fractions, fractions! The children will continue to develop their knowledge of fractions and, naturally, times tables. The bar model and fraction walls will become their new best friend!  Fractions as wholes and equal parts will be modelled in different ways to support the children's learning and they will spend time understanding fractions as part of the number system. The learning will be very practical to secure their learning! The class will also learn about equivalent fractions, using diagrams to support their understanding. The children have worked hard on developing their reasoning and problem solving skills and have really shown how they can help each other by working in pairs. The children will also meet mass, length and money and time. As always, we will continue to keep key addition and subtraction skills bubbling along too - the money and mass units help us to do this as we relate all to the Base 10 equipment.

Science  - Plants! Firstly we get all practical using our powers of observation and dissect some flowers to find all the parts! The children will already know many of the crucial things that plants need, such as water, so here we build on this and investigate how plants grow when they have little space or no soil. The children will be encouraged to plan their investigations fairly and will be tasked with monitoring and recording results regularly. We will also be finding out about pollination and how plants make new flowers - thanks to the bees! - and how some pesky plants manage to find a home in the most unusual of spaces thanks to seed dispersal! Finally the children will discover how water moves through plants and a little about how they make their own food.

RE - In this unit, pupils will find out about how Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and non-religious people try to care for the world. They will consider what motivates people from these worldviews to care for the world, basing their knowledge on scripture and religious teachings. Pupils will consider why the world is not always good and make simple links to religious (e.g Christian, Jewish, Muslim) and non-religious (e.g Humanist) worldviews. They will find out about the Jewish idea of Tikkun Olam and consider how charities like Tzedek help Jewish people to live out ideas and teachings, considering diversity of views. Pupils will have opportunities to raise their own questions about caring for the world and consider the responsibility that everyone must care for the world. 

Geography and History -  Following on from Summer 1's Geography learning, when we looked closely at the local area, the children will now spend more time comparing Leigh now to Leigh in the past, specifically the Victorian era. They will continue to use OS and digital maps, using the keys and becoming familiar with symbols, with a focus on the land changes both during the Victorian time and from the end of the Industrial Revolution to the present day. Plotting these differences, they will come to understand why they happened and what impact they had. This will help us to tie in our previous learning about British Monarchs and add Queen Victoria into our chronology, and the many achievements and inventions that created the Golden Age. They will be able to consider how the local high street has changed, using Archive photos, and understand their identity better by visits to Leigh Archives. This will help them to understand the impact of mining in our town and compare now to Victorian times. We will also consider how Leigh is currently being regenerated and how this is happening by keeping hold of its heritage and history.

Art - Our Art unit is based around the work of local artist LS Lowry, which fits perfectly with the industrial focus of our History and Geography work. Focusing on perspective and digital art as the key skills, the children will use Power Point to copy and paste images of industrial buildings and stickmen, using a layering effect. They will also consider what senses and questions Lowry's work evokes and why he is a significant artist for our area.

Computing - The children will be challenged to make a trailer video for a book. Once they have figured out exactly what a trailer needs, they will then need to apply their summarising skills to pick out the key points, without of course, giving away the ending! They use 'Room on the Broom' for this as it is a well known story which has already been made into an animation and so encourages them to think like animators and story sellers! They will evaluate good and poor shooting skills, different shooting shots to use when filming and what makes a good book trailer. The children will learn to edit a video in iMovie, add text and voice recording. 

French - During this half term the children will learn about the circle of life in French! They will be able to describe where something lives or does not live, in simple terms and describe a food chain. They will compose and write a range of sentences, practising their accent! 

Music - The Little Train of Caipira! The children will listen and reflect on this piece of orchestral music, understanding the story of the music and how it is represented. They will play along to pulse, which wil change, and use percussion instruments to create their own motifs. The children will also use their voices as an instrument to create train-like sounds! Finally they will put them all together as a final piece representing a train journey!  

On top of all that, they also will complete some transition work ready for their new teacher next year. This might be a tricky time for some children and so we will use our PHSE time to address any uncertainties and questions they may have. During Well-Being we will continue to consider emotions and feelings through superheroes, as well as using a lovely book called 'An Unexpected Thing' to think about and reflect on what our hearts feel like when they feel different emotions.

PE - The children continue swimming lessons this half term. The class have a few outdoor athletics lessons to catch up on (thanks to the weather!) before also completing a unit on Strike and Fielding skills. They will learn some cool catching techniques, bowling and batting. They will hopefully be able to apply to a game of kwik cricket too! Our School Games sporting value for this half term is Determination, linked to our HeartSmart unit - 'No Way Through' isn't True! The children will be encouraged to TRY, and see that sometimes you have to keep trying! It's also the School Sports Festival this half term.

Wow! We have a lot to do!! 

Summer Term 1 NEWS!

To say we have done a lot is an understatement this half term! We have work practically and actively in maths, science and geography. We’ve tried to keep a marshmallow brain safe, we have learned about right angles and turns outside and our geography took us out into the local area spotting features that we would like to improve and features that might encourage visitors. We also had to follow a map route along the way! Curious Critters came to visit us along with giant centipede, a skinny pig, snake, tarantula and gecko and we had a visit from a real life radiographer to talk to us about our skeleton (and brought bone biscuits!). The children also had a great day at Haigh Country Park on the low ropes and climbing wall. That’s twice they’ve had to be super brave this half term! We had a lovely picnic and play on the park too before heading back home. In addition to all that, we have written some fantastic persuasive leaflets about Leigh and created a non-chronological report about the skeleton using Pic
Collage. The class are definitely getting ready to move up to Year 4!

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!