Year 3 - Spring 2 - Week 1

Date: 21st Feb 2024 @ 9:35pm

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 at how they communicated. After exploring the front cover of our first story, ‘The Morning I Met a Whale’ by Michael Murphurgo, we predicted what we thought the story would 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 our chosen expert Sir David Attenborough to find out more information. 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 Maths, we have been continuing with measurement using mm, cm & m. Exploring equivalent lengths, comparing lengths and adding and subtracting lengths. Next week, we will be introduced to perimeter for the first time. We will learn that perimeter is the distance around the outside of a closed 2-D shape.

We explored the River Nile this week in our new Geography topic for this term. We began this topic by working in groups to assemble a jigsaw to reveal a picture of the River Nile as seen from space. We then discussed what we know already about the River Nile. Using ‘true or false’ statements we used our thumbs to indicate whether we thought the statements were true or not. The answers were never revealed so we were challenged to use our River Nile eBook and atlas to find out the answers to the statements. We are looking forward to learning lots of exciting facts about the River Nile this term.

Mrs Hughes 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 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 focused this week on ‘Palm Sunday’ and looked at how and why we celebrate as we do we also enjoyed learning about how other cultures around the world celebrate ‘Palm Sunday.’ We identified that the Easter story related to the ‘Salvation’ part of 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.

Have a fantastic weekend Year 3!