Year 3 Blog
Reading
This term, the children have thoroughly enjoyed reading The Iron Man by Ted Hughes. The story follows a giant metal creature who mysteriously appears in a small town, creating a suspenseful plot that kept them eager to read more. The book provided opportunities for children to develop their reading fluency and expression. They particularly enjoyed role-playing different characters, which helped them understand their thoughts, feelings, and actions more deeply. The book is rich in vocabulary, which allowed children to expand their understanding of new words in context. They also had opportunities to visualise key scenes in the story and strengthen their sequencing and summarising skills.
Writing
In English, this term, we began our unit of a ‘losing tale’ by reading a book called ‘Grandpa’s teeth’. The children enjoyed the mystery of the story and found the illustrations very amusing! Throughout the unit we explored a range of grammatical features including, Using noun phrases to create settings using all of the senses, using conjunctions, including to form subordinate clauses and Introducing speech punctuation (inverted commas). Children then thought about and started to plan their own losing tale story. They came up with some great ideas including, The Gruffalo that lost his horns, the fairy that lost her wings and many more. It was fabulous to see the children include the grammatical features we had learnt into their final piece of writing.


The next unit we moved onto was a ‘recount’. We read the book called ‘ The Iron Man ’The children have enjoyed transferring their knowledge from our reading lessons into English. We have covered a range of grammatical features in this unit including, using paragraphs, expressing time, place and cause using conjunctions, adverbs and prepositions, simple and progressive tenses, object and subject, and the past perfect tense. The final piece of writing for this unit is a Newspaper article on Iron man. Children will be able to use their imaginations and come up with creative headlines whilst recounting the events of the Iron man in an article format.
Maths
We have just wrapped up our unit on multiplying and dividing, the children have learned a range of strategies for multiplying one and two digit numbers together as well as dividing them. We even started to learn how to account for remainders in division for the first time which is always tricky but they did really well! We have now just started our unit on Length and Perimeter which the children have been enjoying so far. Measuring all sorts of objects around the classroom and discussion which unit of measurement would be best suited for measuring certain objects. We’re going to continue to build on this fantastic work into the next half term. We have lots of practical lessons planned, including measuring each other to find out who is the tallest, who is the smallest, and whose height falls in the middle of our class.
Science
This half term, we have finished our unit on animals and nutrition. Children have enjoyed exploring the bones and muscles in the human body as well as different animal skeletons. We explored how skeletons vary between animals, vertebrates and invertebrates, endoskeletons and exoskeletons, and the advantages and disadvantages of each type of skeleton. Nutrition was next on our list! We learnt about what nutrition is and where it comes from before moving onto different food groups and the effects they have on our body. Children enjoyed creating a 3D plate showing the balance of different food groups that generates a nutritious meal. For the final weeks of term, we have moved onto a new unit called ‘Light and Shadows’. Children will be exploring light sources and where they come from, how light travels, keeping our skin safe from the sun and how shadows are formed.


Value
This term, we have focused on empathy. The children have been encouraged to use kind hands and kind words when out on the playground at break and lunch. We are helping the children to think about the feelings of others, what to do if somebody is upset and how a small act of kindness can quickly be spread throughout the classroom and then the school. We are looking forward to our lesson on mental health and how this can help us to consider that the actions we take can affect the people around us.
PSHE
In PSHE, children will continue exploring their dreams and goals. They will learn about the importance of setting personal targets and the challenges they may face along the way. Through discussions and activities, they will develop an understanding of perseverance—how to stay motivated and overcome obstacles when things get difficult. Children will also explore strategies for seeking help when needed, recognising that support from others can be key to achieving their goals. They will learn about different jobs and career aspirations, helping them to think about their own ambitions for the future.
As part of Children’s Mental Health Week, children completed a variety of activities to develop their emotional well-being and resilience.




