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 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 narrative, with a focus on description. 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 and addition and subtraction. 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 our unit on light. We have learnt and compared different light sources, for example a light bulb and the sun and have also learnt that the moon, although it appears to generate light, it in fact, only reflects light from the sun and therefore is not a source of light itself.

We have also explored shadows, having some fun on the playground with them and in the last week on term, we created a shadow puppet display.

In Geography, our topic this term 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.

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 pained 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. I have enjoyed meeting most of you on the door. We have welcomed four new members to our class since the start of term, so a special welcome to these families.