Year 3

Mrs Clarke and Mrs Parfitt

Our topic for this term is called ‘Who First Lived in Britain?’, which has a History focus, looking at the life of Early Britons from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. We will be thinking about what life would have been like in those days and comparing them to our own. We will also use our creativity to make our own cave paintings and to create our own shelters.

In maths over the half term, we will be focusing on number sense: what the children know about numbers and number facts. Pupils will revise key mental strategies that they have encountered throughout Key Stage One and the learning in this unit will be revisited and practised frequently during Maths Meetings, which last for about 15 minutes most afternoons and help to develop fluency and reasoning skills. We will also focus on the understanding of place value for numbers up to 1000. Pupils will develop a deeper understanding of the magnitude of numbers and develop useful mental calculating skills such as rounding and place value addition and subtraction. They go on to apply this knowledge to solve problems.

In English we will be reading a range of texts linked to our theme, including “Ug- Boy Genius of the Stone Age” and “Stone Age Boy”. We will consolidate the skills from Year 2 and use these to work on developing our descriptive writing, thinking about both character and setting descriptions. We will also work towards to writing our own short stories with a clear beginning, middle and ending, before editing and improving them. When learning grammatical skills we will focus on vocabulary choices, especially using adjectives and verbs in our writing to add more description, prepositions to link or start sentences and conjunctions to link ideas in a sentence. In reading we will be making predictions, discussing books in groups and as a class, comparing books and learning how to explain a book’s main message or theme.

P.E lessons will be on a Monday and Thursday this term, so please ensure that your child comes to school wearing their PE kit on these days. This should be a pair of black tracksuit bottoms, a white polo shirt or house colour polo shirt, a school jumper and trainers. If you are unsure of the house colour T shirt that your child needs please ask.

In Year 3 we use Accelerated Reader (AR). The children will complete an assessment quiz to find out what books they can choose from (ZPD range). After reading the book they will then take a quiz answering questions about that book and hopefully earn some points. Please encourage your child to read as often as possible and talk to them about the books that they have read. Your child will also have a spelling rule and some example spellings to learn during the week. We will be continuing to use Maths With Parents homework too.

If you have any queries or questions about this information or any other concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me.

We work with a company called SEND Supported at school and they are releasing newsletters each week offering support and guidance to parents of children who many have additional needs in school. Please find below a link to these newsletters:

There are also lots of other resources and information available on their website. The 'Things to do Issue 2 - Resources' file has some lovely activities for all children regardless of whether they have additional needs or not. There are lots of great visual puzzles and games for children to play so please have a look if you can. There are also resources available now to support with developing children's memory skills in 'Thing to do Issue 3 - Resources.'

Useful links:

English: