Year 3 - Spring 1 - Week 1

Date: 6th Jan 2023 @ 4:40pm

Welcome back and Happy New Year to all! The children have all returned to school full of enthusiasm and learning has been electric this week!

 Our Collective Worship this week focused on the Christian celebration of Epiphany. We learnt that the word Epiphany means ‘to appear’ and that the feast is a celebration of the time that Baby Jesus was seen by the visitors who had travelled a long way to see him. The children were extremely interested in how the Wise Men read the stars and constellations to interpret meanings, which involved our own research of well-known constellations.

  In Miss Lucas’ writing group, we have been writing amazing fantasy stories based on the much loved book ‘Winter’s Child’. The children worked really hard to include adverbs of time, conjunctions, inverted commas and adventurous vocabulary. We can’t wait for you to read them! Next week, we will start our new focus text ‘Stone Age Boy’, which we know will be a huge hit!

 In Mrs McRae's writing group, we have begun reading the folktale The Mitten adapted by Jan Brett.  We have collected wintery words and phrases from the text, learned new vocabulary through context clues and identified the setting and characters.  Next week, the children will be looking at the main events of the story, summarising the beginning, middle and end, and brainstorming ideas for their own version of The Mitten.

 In Miss Lucas’ Maths group, we have completed our unit on measure by adding and subtracting measurements, which at times challenged us to convert measurements from mm to cm or cm to m. Each week, we will be completing a short multiplication challenge and progress will then be determined by accuracy and timing. If children complete the given challenge accurately within a set time, they will move on to the next challenge the following week. This week we began with multiplication and division questions based on the 2 times table.

 In Mrs McRae's Maths group, we started learning about multiplication and division together by looking at how to make equal groups of objects.  The children are grasping the concept that "6 x 5" means "six groups of five."  If you begin practising multiplication facts at home, then please use the words "equal groups of" and/or "groups of" when explaining this new concept.  Next week, we will be learning about the multiplication symbol and how to make arrays.

 Our Reading lessons this week focused on the book ‘The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse’. The children were very engaged as some of them either have the book themselves or were able to watch the animation over the Christmas holidays. The children made predictions and used inference to decipher character’s emotions, relationships and meanings behind their words. They also pondered on some thoughtful quotes from the book and thought about what their answers would be to key questions. Next week, we will begin our new focus text ‘Iron Man’, which the children are looking forward to reading.

 In History, we have continued our fascinating topic of Stone Age, were we explored cave art and using our imagination and research of excavations, we produced our own cave art. Next week, we will zone in on the Bronze Age.

 In PE, we played competitive hockey games demonstrating skill, agility, teamwork and reaction time. Miss Lucas was impressed with how quickly we grasped the rules of the game.

 We have focused on wellbeing this week and the children were able to identify their feelings towards different aspects of their life. We had a wonderful discussion about the mixture of emotions we can feel and thought carefully about which emotion we think we feel the most. Then, the children moved on to thinking how to ensure we can make 2023 a happy year by identifying a number of things that make us happy and talked about how and when we could do these activities more often this year. Some wonderful ideas were; spending time playing with pets, visiting relatives and making our own story books.

We are looking forward to a full week back next week.

Reminders:

•  Year 3 PE lessons take place every Monday and Thursday. Please ensure your child arrives at school in their PE kit on these days.