Welcome to Year 3 !

I hope you have all had a wonderful summer and are looking forward to this academic year.

We have lots of fun and interesting learning planned in our class this year. I look forward to the children sharing what they have learnt with you at home.

Adults in our classroom:

Class teacher - Miss H Siddall

Teaching assistants - Mrs H Illsley (Monday & Tuesday)

                                          Mrs A Chapman (Wednesday-Friday)

Support staff - Miss E Moody

                           Mrs S Bartram

Autumn 2

Welcome back! I hope you have had a wonderful half term break. We have lots of exciting events leading us up to Christmas, including leading the church service on the 27th November. We hope to see you there. 

Key Days:

Indoor PE - This will remain on a Thursday. Please can children bring trainers. We are focusing on health related exercises and studying how our pulse changes as we exercise.

Forest school - This will continue on a Wednesday up until Christmas with Mrs Burns. Suitable footwear, such as wellies, may be kept in school during this half term. 

Reading records - These will be checked every Thursday. Thank you for continuing to read with your children at least 4 times a week, it is greatly appreciated. Please can you ensure children also bring in their reading books so that these can also be changed if required.

Spellings - These will be handed out every Friday in preparation for the test the following Friday. We are moving onto year 3/4 spellings this half term and will cover spelling patterns and learning new methods to help us during Monday SPAG lessons.

In our guided reading sessions, we are collectively reading 'The Firework Makers daughter'. Through a number of reading strategies, our children will learn to decode and comprehend the text to encourage fluency and understanding. We use a different 'VIPER' each day to practise different skills. 

Vocabulary

Inference

Predict

Explain

Retrieve

Summarise

The text explores 'Mount Merapi,' a volcano in which we will be studying and writing a non-chronological report about, in our English sessions. The children were hooked on volcanos, after learning how igneous rocks are formed during our chocolate rocks demonstration. Who doesn't love a bit of chocolate!

Autumn 1 

Key Days:

Indoor PE - Thursdays - This half term we will be looking at gymnastics during our PE sessions which are currently being led by the wonderful active fusion.

Outdoor PE - Wednesday - Forest school will take place on a Wednesday afternoon with the lovely Mrs Burns. 

Reading records and new books - Thursday - Please can all reading records and books be brought in on a Thursday for them to be checked and changed. Children are expected to read at home to an adult at least 4 times a week as part of their homework.

Spelling tests are on a Friday. Throughout the week we use 'Little Wandle phonics bridge to spelling' to introduce new spellings for sounds we know and practice spelling them. The children then take the focused spellings for that week home on a Friday to practice for homework, in preparation for their spelling test the following Friday. 

In writing this half term, we will be writing a set of instructions with the help of our class text "How to wash a woolly mammoth." We use Talk for writing to immerse our children in the chosen genre and imitate one together, before creating our own.

Our focus this half term is the Stone Age as we step back in time and discover artefacts from the Stone Age that tell us what life was like. We are using a cross-curricular approach as our topic is embedded throughout our learning for example, we are also looking at rocks in science and creating our very own cave paintings in art!

We have already taken on the roles of hunter-gatherers to imagine what jobs people had to do in the Stone Age and how it is different from our world today: