Year 3 - Autumn 2 - Week 5
Date: 2nd Dec 2022 @ 4:10pm
Step into Christmas! We were greeted by a lovely, little elf on Thursday morning who left us a letter saying we needed to guess his name correctly for his magic to begin. On Friday morning, he revealed his name to be ‘Snowy’ and we found him making snow angels! The children really enjoyed making detailed snowflakes and paper chains to decorate our classroom. We also had fun participating in some Christmas karaoke, where we had to read the lyrics on the screen to some of our all-time favourite songs.
We rounded up our focus on 'Peace' in Collective Worship this week by recapping all we have learnt about peace and how we can apply this to our lives. Next week, we will move onto te theme of 'Hope'. We have completed our RE unit on Tuesday. The learning goals were centred around what we do to prepare for special visitors. We also described where we have seen Christ-like behaviour. Since the RE unit is finished for this term, the next two Tuesdays, the children will be completing a DT project. Their learning outcome will be making a 3-D pop-up card. If you have any pop-up books at home, then please take time to analyse how the pages are put together with your children so that they can start imagining how to construct their own pop-up pages.
In Mrs McRae's English group, we have started our new text: The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg. As a pre-assessment for this letter writing unit, the children all wrote to Santa. Our other activities for this book focused on summarising our reading and sequencing key events in the story. Next week, we will work on using expanded noun phrases and conveying thoughts and feelings in a letter.
In Mrs McRae's Maths group, we have focused on adding two 2-digit numbers together. The children have used pictures of base-10 to find their answers. Please practise adding 2-digit numbers at home whenever you can because this learning goal proved to be very tricky this week. We will move towards subtracting two 2-digit number next week, but we will keep revisiting how to add them, as well.
In Miss Lucas’ English group, we began by writing some very interesting letters to Father Christmas, Mrs Claus or the elves in the North Pole. The children tried to write in paragraphs, including questions and varied sentence types. Then, we revised writing sentences with conjunctions in them. The children were amazed to find out we can move the main clause and the subordinate clause around to vary our sentence types. On Thursday, the children used similes to add detail to one of the pages in the book Winter’s Child. Great use of imaginations! On Friday, we finished the week using 'Conscience Alley' to explore what characters should do next.
In Miss Lucas’ Maths group, we have completed our unit on addition and subtraction this week. First, we had to make decisions as to whether to use addition or subtraction to solve word problems. The children have recognised their learning using ‘the learning curve’ poster and identified areas for development within addition and subtraction. They decided it would be a good idea to continue practising this further at home and during morning 4 a day time. You can find all taught Maths lessons on Google Classrooms if you wish to review the work with your child.
Both groups have started the Read, Write Inc Spellings programme and log books will be coming home next week with spellings that each individual child has chosen to focus on for the week. The children have expressed how much they are enjoying spelling sessions, which is wonderful news.
On Tuesday, some of the children finished writing their entry for the writing competition and their ideas for their imagined 'Winter Wonderlands' were incredible! Their descriptive choice of vocabulary will definitely transport the judges to a magical land.
In Reading lessons, we are focusing on the Christmas theme by watching Christmas adverts and using our retrieval and inference skills to answer questions about settings, characters and themes.
In Music, the children developed their skills on the glockenspiels by playing songs containing the notes E and D. We are getting much better at playing in time!
In PSHE, we focused on compliments and discussed how we give compliments and receive them. We have also all written a lovely note to someone in the school and posted them in our Positivity Post box. We can’t wait to see smiling faces around the school because of the notes people have received from us.
In PE, we demonstrated our skills in the game of hockey. We were really good at moving around with the ball, focusing on our grip of the hockey stick and keeping the ball in sight. We learnt how to step, push and glide the ball to our partner with greater accuracy.
We continued our love for the Stone Age by discovering Skara Brae in Scotland, which is a preserved Stone Age settlement. We were amazed to find out that bones, grains and even jewellery was found during the excavation. Higher order skills were demonstrated, when the children explained what the evidence told them about life in the Stone Age period. Miss Lucas was extremely impressed.
Our week ended with the exciting ‘Christmas Extravaganza’, where we took part in lots of fun activities such as glitter tattoos, cake decorating, football shootout and guess the elves names!
Have a magical weekend!
Reminders:
- Thursday 8th December is our Santa Dash. The children are allowed to come to school in Mufti, but must be sensible to run in. Children can bring festive accessories or costumes to get changed into and race in.
- Friday 9th December is Christmas Jumper Day.