Autumn Term Highlights from Year 3

Year 3 have had a wonderful start to the year, it has been lovely getting to know everyone and settling into our Year 3 classroom. Everyone has been doing superb learning and I can’t wait to see what this year brings!

In Writing, Year 3 have learnt about biography writing as well as narratives, news reports and letter writing. For our biography unit, we focused on writing about Roald Dahl’s life, learning about what a fantastic children’s author he was and where he found his inspiration. We learnt that listening to his mum read to him as a child was one of the reasons Roald wanted to be a children’s author. For our narrative unit, we focused on describing Mr. Willy Wonka from ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, written by Roald Dahl. We used thesauruses to expand our vocabulary and used words like luxurious, stylish, frantic, and chirpy to describe his individualism.

In Maths, Year 3 have continued their learning of place value, addition and subtraction, and finally multiplication and division. We have focused on using number lines, spotting patterns and predicting answers using the information given. We have also started to learn the new skill of using column addition while carrying over. Everyone has given this their all and I am confident with a little more practice we will all crack this method! We continue to practice our timetables every day, well done to those children who are also practicing these at home. Every effort counts and will contribute to you being better and faster mathematicians.

In Science, we have completed a number of different units, including skeletons, movement, nutrition, and food waste. We started by learning the names of the bones in the human body, we then compared the human skeleton to skeletons of animals, talking about different joints and how they help us move. We then moved on to nutrition, focusing on a balanced diet including the main food groups and what our bodies need to survive. As well as creating menus for different dietary requirements.

In Geography, our topic has been European Neighbours, firstly we identified Europe on the world map, as well as the other six continents. We then explored different countries within Europe, learning about their national flags, dialects spoken and famous landmarks.

Our History topic this term has been the stone age and iron civilization. We have learnt about this topic by completing number lines and recreating and making traditional clothing. We explored the Bronze, Iron and Stone Age and learnt what defined these eras. We tried to imagine what it would be like living in these times and completed a ‘day in the life of’ to make comparisons between now and then.

In Art, our focus artist has been Pablo Picasso. We took time to learn who Picasso was and key events in his life. We learnt that he suffered from depression, which resulted in a lot of his paintings being painted in shades of blue. We then focused on his cubism style and recreated our own portraits using different shapes to make our pieces quirky and individual. We have thoroughly enjoyed this topic and have created some very colourful and imaginative pieces.

Finally, I would like to thank all our Year 3 families. Your support is crucial and very much appreciated!

Mrs Davies