Year 3 Newsletter - Autumn 1

Dear Parents/Carers, A big welcome back. We hope you had a fantastic summer break and are looking forward to a fantastic and exciting year ahead.Special days for our class this half term are:Monday: Hand homework in to be marked. Monday: Spelling test.Tuesday: Times table test.Tuesday: Homework will be given out.Wednesday: PE - Dance (indoors). School PE kit - shorts and T-shirt.Thursday: PE - Outdoor activities - School PE kit for outdoors.EnglishIn English, our writing will be linked to our topic ‘Stone Age to Iron Age’. We begin the half term by looking at the book the ‘Stone Age Boy’. The children will use the themes in the book to create their own story with a historical setting through hot seating and drama. As a class, we are going to have a debate about our lives now compared to Stone Age times and discuss advantages and disadvantages. Following this, we will use research to deepen our understanding of the Stone Age times to help us plan and write our own non-chronological reports. Finally this half-term, we will are looking at poetry and rhyming couplets. Children will be given the opportunity to perform their poems using intonation, control of tone and volume and use actions to help deliver their performance.Children can change their reading books on a daily basis. It is important that your child reads every night at home. This will increase their reading speed, enabling comprehension exercises to be completed well. This half term spellings will be sent out weekly and children will be tested on a weekly basis. Please encourage your child to practise their spellings regularly to support both their reading and writing.MathsMaths this half term begins with number, where we will concentrate on counting, comparing and ordering numbers and patterns up to 10 000. After this, we are concentrating on adding numbers within 10 000. Through this unit we will look at finding the sum of a number by adding without regrouping, regrouping in hundreds and addition with regrouping in ones, tens and hundreds. Next we are moving onto fractions, where we will identify and name unit and non-unit fractions. We will count up and down in tenths and finish the unit by connecting tenths to decimal measure and division by 10. The half term finishes with subtraction. In this unit, the children will understand the meaning of finding the difference through subtraction without regrouping, subtraction with regroupingin hundreds and thousands, regrouping from thousands to hundreds and regrouping in ones, tens, hundreds and thousandsTimes tables remain a focus this year. We will practise our times tables daily through a variety of games and songs. Each child has been assigned a username to use Times table Rockstars, a specialist website focused on improving the recall speed of times tables. Further information and usernames and passwords will be sent home separately this half term. We hope you will be supportive and encourage your child to use the website and/or practise their times table regularly at home to improve their recall speed. Creative Curriculu m This term our topic is ‘Stone Age to Iron Age’ , which looks at comparing Britain in those times to now. In Science we are studying plants, where the children will identify and describe the functions of different parts of flowering plants. They will look at the requirements of plants to live and grow, investigate the way in which water is transported within plants and finally explore the role flowers play in the life cycle of flowering plants including pollination, seed formation and seed dispersal. In Art, we are linking our work to this term’s topic by looking at Lascaux cave paintings and creating our own wax resist designs. Computing is looking at word processing skills, research and using these skill to create our own Google slideshows. We also will be starting Spanish this half term where the children will develop their intercultural understanding of the language, listen to and respond to simple rhymes, stories and songs and to read and write simple words.

We hope your child enjoys their first term in Year 3. Please don’t hesitate to speak to the class teachers if there are any problems.

Many Thanks, Mrs Pennington and Mr Roberts