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 2024-2025

Class Information

This half term.... Summer Term 1 (April - May 2025)

The first half term of the final term!! 

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 some outdoor Personal Development days that the children have waiting them! 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 - The children will continue to 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. We will then 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.

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 pneumatic toy! After exploring what a pneumatic system is, they will create design criteria. Using thumbnail sketches for some ideas they will then use an exploded diagram to share and communicate one idea. The mini engineers will select appropriate equipment and materials before making their system within the housing they’ve designed.

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 can Christians learn from the Creation story?

The unit focuses on the stories of Creation and The Fall as two parts of the ‘Big Story’ of the Bible. Children familiarise themselves with the Creation story from Genesis and it’s key messages for many Christians about the world being good. They consider how Christian’s are called to look after God’s world. They then move on to the story of The Fall, where this fits in the Bible Big Picture and consider the messages of temptation and sin.

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. 

  
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.

Personal Development Outdoor Learning – The children have several outings planned to help build their team work, resilience and confidence. For Summer 1, they will travel to Haigh Country Park to try out den building and axe throwing. They will then visit Scotman’s Flash to sail some rafted canoes! Finally, they will return to Haigh to use the low ropes course and climbing wall!          

Spring Term 2 NEWS!

This half term involved a lot of food! And dancing! And singing! We began investigating some really fun videos for performance poetry and tried our best to perform some with expression in our voices and bodies. The children also showed great maths skills when they met fractions. Using the fraction tiles to support them they had a great start to Year 3 fraction life. We explored food groups and the food tasting wheel through science and DT lessons and also through our Star in the Jar treat which was a pizza party (homemade by the class)! God blessed us with some lovely weather so we were also double treated to ice creams – one from Mrs Hill as a thanks for our recent Ofsted report and lollies just because we are really growing into our Year 3 roles now.

Some of the children in the class took part in the Wigan Borough Dance Festival performing with other key stage 2 children to ‘One Short Day’ from Wicked. They looked amazing and absolutely enjoyed the day. The whole school celebrated Comic Relief with an 80s day and danced along to 80s song on the playground with grown-ups who were invited along. The class have also practised singing in canons this half term….tricky to stay in time!

We were definitely ready for a long Easter break but will be raring to go when we return…for our last term of Year 3! (Already!)

Spring Term 1 NEWS!

Following the Christmas celebrations, we returned taller and ready to fill our brains! During this half term the class received their second Star in the Jar reward which involved lots of their own stationery from home and an activity afternoon. Year 3 did lots of active learning this half term. We had a visit from Commando Joe’s to teach us a little bit about resilience. We also had loads of fun across the half term with active breaks focused around Teamwork - as our school games value. Our foundation subjects saw us exploring light and shadows (we loved that!), role playing some of the stories of Britain’s best known monarchs and playing French playground games. In Computing we were active learning by role playing the parts of a laptop and their jobs and PE (always active!) introduced us to Dodgeball which was brilliant! We have some very exciting half terms coming up as the weather improves - we can’t wait!

Autumn 2 Term 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, and were join by our elves from home for Elf Breakfast! Year 3 took part in the Christmas Service at church and 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. 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 thoroughly enjoyed meeting Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant to inspire their writing.  

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 and our School Value of Trust.

We took part on Odd Socks Day for Anti-Bullying and celebrated our first Star in the Jar reward. On top of all that, we also tried to travel to school actively at least once a week to earn November and December’s badges. It’s no wonder we were ready for a rest!

Autumn 1 Term NEWS!

Our brains have definitely grown this half term! A huge focus for Year 3 has been developing our teamwork skills. We have woven it into as many opportunities as we can; quick active games, partner work, group work, whole class missions like our Star in the Jar rewards. We have also begun to develop our resilience skills, using our PATHS and Heartsmart lessons to understand that mistakes are learning opportunities and not failures. This has been tough for lots of us, and we will continue to work on it.

Along the way this half term, Year 3 have settled into new routines in the juniors and shown that they are working hard to follow the Shine Rules. We very quickly settle into each day ready to learn and have enjoyed using the equipment at break times, as well as Funky Moves Friday! The class have enjoyed learning about volcanoes and discovering about rocks (with the help of Starburst!) and what goes on beneath our feet (with t eh help of playdough!). They have had lots and lots of practical maths lessons to support their new learning on 3-digit numbers and created some wonderful Mr Men characters of their own.

We finished the half term with our Star in the Jar reward of pjs and own clothes, as well as a sneaky trip to the cinema to watch the brand-new Pixar film ‘The Wild Robot’, which brought lots of emotions out! What a tearjerker!

It’s been a very busy half term and I think we are all ready for a well-earned rest, ready to go again for Autumn 2!