Year 3 - Spring 2 - Week 1

Date: 23rd Feb 2022 @ 1:31pm

What an incredibly busy first week back, full of excitement!

When we arrived at school on Monday, we experienced a range of unusual sounds. Working together, we discussed and identified that the sound was coming from a school of whales and were amazed how they communicated. After, we explored the front cover of our first story, ‘The Morning I Met a Whale’ by Michael Murphurgo, we predicted what we thought the story was going to be about as well as its genre and book type. Before we started to read, we decided we wanted to learn more about whales, writing detailed letters to experts to find out more information. These incredible letters were so detailed that we decided that they must go in our author book! Next week we switch books for a short period looking at the ‘Big Blue Whale’ by Nicola Davies.

We also focused on this text in our Reading sessions, exploring the interesting vocabulary within the text and how the author used this to create suspense and an interesting narrative. We compared this fictional story to an interesting article about three whales that got stuck in the River Thames. We focused on our comprehension skills in this session, retrieving information from the text.

In Science, we started our new topic ‘How does your garden grown?’ We explored real life flowering plants, pulling them apart, labelling and describing their different parts and functions. We then applied this knowledge, creating our own flowering plants in our books and labelling it accordingly. Next week, we will be focusing on water transportation in plants and how it travels from the roots to the flower.

In Maths, we started our new topic ‘Statistics’, we connected our learning back to Year 2, recapping tallies and pictograms. This allowed us to create our own pictogram tables to gather information about everyone in class, such as our favourite game, food and colour. Next week we will explore bar charts as well as starting another topic, ‘Measurement’, with a special focus on length and height.

In PE, we were super excited to start our new sport, Football! We started off by developing our basic football skills dribbling and passing the balls to our friends. With Mr Brindley, we continued this focus and even managed to play a small game! It was, as always, incredibly competitive and it is safe to say football is a firm favourite in Year 3.

We explored the world map in Geography, reminding ourselves of the 7 continents and 5 oceans connecting our learning back to KS1. Afterwards, we identified where we were in the world and how we belonged to the continent of Europe. We then used our atlases and Chromebooks to create a poster about a country in Europe. Next week, we look at Europe in more detail, the countries that belong to it and their features.

Mr Fogg was back this week for another incredible drumming lesson, it has been, and always will be, one of our favourite lessons. We continued to work together to develop our tempo and  rhythm  to create a fantastic piece. We cannot wait to see how we will develop over the next five weeks!

In RE, we started our new topic, ‘Exploring the Sadness and Joy of Easter’. We had to first identify where the Easter story fell within the bible and also in relation to ‘The Big Frieze’. We identified that the Easter story related to the ‘Salvation’ part the ‘Big Frieze’. This linked closely to our Collective Worship focus of ‘Joy’ and allowed us to fill our own jars full of joy thinking carefully about everything and everyone who brings us happiness.

This week we also celebrated some amazing superstars in our class, both linked to our February climate change focus. One of our wonderful students took part in a creative writing competition hosted by Planet Super League and the author Dan Freedman. I am delighted to say that they won receiving a signed copy of Dan Freedman’s new Jamie Johnson book. As well as this, our other superstar, interviewed Jen Gale, author of ‘Sustainable(ish)’ discussing what she is doing and how others can tackle climate change.

Reminders:

• World Book Day will be next Thursday. Children are encouraged to come dressed as a character from their favourite story.
• Next Thursday, children will need to bring in their PE kits to allow them to participate in PE with FHS.
• Please ensure that any books that the children read at home are recorded on Google Classroom.