Welcome back to Spring Term

Welcome back to Spring Term in Year 3! There has been so much exciting learning going on and the children have impressed us with their enthusiasm and willingness to embrace new challenges.

English

In our English lessons, we have thoroughly enjoyed reading The Iron Man by Ted Hughes.

We have immersed ourselves in the book by carrying out lots of drama activities and retelling the story at each point to check that we have understood the plot. In writing, we have had a big push on punctuating sentences accurately with the correct end of sentence punctuation.

The children have also been thinking carefully about how to engage the reader by using a range of ambitious vocabulary and interesting sentence starters. We used an animation of The Iron Man to help us to write detailed character and setting descriptions. We then progressed to writing from different character’s perspectives and wrote diary entries from Hogarth’s point of view. Have a read of the children’s wonderful writing below:

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 whichunit 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 as well as using it for a practical lesson on Number Day this Friday.

Science

This term we have been learning about light and shadows. We have learnt about what a light source is. We discussed that the sun was our biggest source of light. The children went around school looking for different light sources and identifying how that particular light source helps us. For example, some children identified the ‘exit light’ in the hall and classrooms. We spoke about how this light would help us find the exit incase of a fire. Our second lesson saw us being more investigative, we looked at the impact the sun has on our skin if we do not wear suncream. We placed different factors of suncream into separate bags along with some UV beads, which were left in the sun for 15 minutes. The results were very shocking to the children, because even with factor 30 on the UV beads some still changed colour showing the radiation from the sun. Our third lesson started to look into different materials and whether light could travel through them. The children learnt words such as Transparent, Translucent and Opaque. 

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be looking into how we can measure our shadows and whether they can be used to tell stories and also our reflections and the intention that mirrors our images back to front. 

History

This term we have been learning about the Ancient Egyptians. The children used an atlas to identify where Ancient Egypt is on a map and how long ago Ancient Egypt was (around 5,000 years ago). We have also looked at why the river Nile was so important to the Ancient Egyptians, the children created posters to show off the uses and importance of the river. Our third lesson was focused on the Great Pyramids of Egypt and why they were built. The children watched a virtual tour showing inside the pyramids and the different chambers for the Pharaohs. We used our artistic skills again in this lesson as the children then created their own mini pyramids using paper nets. In future lessons, we will be looking at Egyptian hieroglyphics, gods and the afterlife. Also, why and how we know so much about Ancient Egypt. 

We are looking forward to the rest of the Spring Term and have commenced our practises for our excting Year 3 and Year 4 play! Look out for more details in mid February.

We hope you have enjoyed finding out about what Year 3 have been up to over the last few weeks. As ever, please continue to encourage reading at home, spelling practise and remind your child to login to Times Tables Rockstars to improve their multiplication and disvision knowledge.Thank you for your suport with this!