Year 3 blog - 24.2.23

Date: 24th Feb 2023 @ 1:09pm

24.02.2023

What a fabulous start to the second half of the Spring Term we’ve had, with the children bringing their kindness, wonderful personalities and fabulous attitudes to learning back to the classroom!

We’ve begun reading Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man and the children love the story already - they’ve already created some superb artwork to use as a springboard for their writing, gathering adverbs and adjectives from the text to bring their work to life.  Our recent work on focused drawing has really helped the children to listen and create at the same time.

The children are really excited about our new computing project: over the next few weeks we’ll work as teams to plan, create and film stop-motion trailers for the Iron Man story.  They have generated some great ideas about how they can use props, costumes and sound effects to make their films as exciting as possible.

Our new RE unit is about celebrations so we’ve talked a lot about the road to Easter, thinking about the key events that lead to this special time of year.  We’ll spend time next week mapping out what a special celebration would look like if each of us had the chance to plan one, so please take a moment to reflect on this with your child.  What would they celebrate?  Who would be the person at the centre of the celebration be?  How would they celebrate?

In music we’ve begun to explore traditional music and instruments: this week we’ve looked at the sitar.  This provides the perfect opportunity for you to play Beatles tracks at home and have a good sing-along!  We’ve been impressed by how many Beatles songs the children already know, it’s great that they are aware of the rich cultural history of our city.

We’ve been exploring mass in maths, which has prompted some very interesting and unexpected questions – would you have the same mass on the International Space Station as you would if you were on Earth?  Does the bigger pack of sweets always weigh more?  They’ve encouraged some lively debate! The children have been reading scales in grams and kilograms so don’t be surprised if they offer to make a cake or measure out ingredients for dinner.

The children have been fascinated by our science work on magnets – our topic for this half term is Forces so we’ve been exploring which materials are magnetic, and how magnets can attract and repel each other. There were lots of curious little minds at play in Thursday’s lesson!

There’s a new homework grid available this week with lots of lovely activities to share.  As ever, please encourage your child to access the TT Rockstars programme daily at home; it only needs to be for 10 minutes but it makes such an enormous difference.  Choose the Jamming mode and select the times tables that your child is comfortable with to begin with then add in the 3, 4, 8 x tables.  These catchy songs will also help embed learning:

Skip count by 8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdqAA9Ky2DY

Skip count by 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJY1_fzzM6Y

And finally, please remember to book your Parents’ Evening appointment on School Spider.  We look forward to seeing you and sharing your children’s work.

Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

The Year Three Team