Welcome to Year 3.
Our Teachers are Mrs Wood and Mrs Hornblow and our Teaching Assistants are Mrs Kotrcova, Mr Le Roch and Mrs Da Palma.
Jan 102025
Welcome back!
It has been lovely to welcome everyone back after the Christmas holidays. We hope you all had a wonderful break. Thank you again for all your kind gifts -the whole team are very grateful.
In English we have started using a new book as a stimulus for our writing called ‘War and Peas’. This week we did a lot of work on understanding the main character and building our vocabulary using a thesaurus.
In Maths we are working on the 3 times table. We have been using manipulatives to show our times table facts as arrays.
In Geography we started our new topic: Mountains and Volcanoes! In DT we started learning about pizza and did a quiz about the history of pizza. Do you know what the word pizza means in Italian?
Our new Science topic is light and we worked hard thinking about objects that are sources of light. We are encouraging everyone to go and take a look at the moon installation in the nave of the cathedral in St Albans.
We hope you have a lovely weekend. Don’t forget your recorders every Monday and PE kits for Mondays and Thursdays. Please ensure you are reading regularly with your child and asking them questions. Please record this in their reading record.
The Year 3 team.
Dec 192024
Panto, Recorder Performance and a Big Thank You!
We have just completed our final week at school for 2024. It has been action packed full of rehearsals, performances and special work.
The Pantomime was fun with lots of opportunities to join in.
Year 3 hard at work performing our Christmas Recorder Concert!( See photo below).Well done everyone and thank you for all your practising.We also had our Christmas dinner on Wednesday which was a lovely celebration.Work continued too. In Maths we learnt about perimeter and in English we created a poster showing how we celebrate Christmas Day. We found out more facts about Christmas traditions across the UK and examined food labels in Science.Finally today we ended the term with special Christmas activities.Thank you for your continued support and thank you for your kind gifts.It just remains for us all to wish you a very Happy Christmas however you are celebrating and we look forward to welcoming you back on Tuesday 7th January 2025!The Year 3 team.
Dec 132024
A winter storm with a heroic mission, curious Christmas facts and polygons!
We wrote our own narrative for Mowser and Tom’s mission to save their village from starving. We braved the Great Storm-Cat with them and returned to Mousehole with enough fish to feed them all. Everyone included what Tom said to Mowser, they did a great job!
In Maths we continued to learn about shapes. We moved onto polygons (any shapes with 3 or more sides) and investigated the number of sides and vertices for each shape.
We read about Christmas around the UK and discovered some interesting facts such as; Christmas being banned in the UK during the Reformation and Scotland working on Christmas Day until it was made a holiday in 1958.
In Science we learnt about the foods we need to eat a balanced diet nad in History we finished learning about the Iron Age by reflecting on all the changes and ranking them in order of importance.
On Monday we have our final practise for our Recorder Christmas Concert. Please make sure they practise the songs at home this weekend and bring their recorders in every day next week.
Dec 062024
Parallel, perpendicular and punctuating speech!
We have had a wonderful week of learning in Year 3. We started our new book ‘The Mousehole Cat’ and found out it is a real story that is still celebrated in Mousehole today! We investigated how to punctuate speech through reading activities, songs and cutting up sentences using macaroni to show where the inverted commas go! Take a look. Then we carefully wrote our speech sentences in our books.
An exciting week in Maths too, we have learnt the meanings of the terms vertical, horizontal, parallel and perpendicular. We have worked hard on our skills at using a ruler accurately.
In Science we loved learning about our joints and how muscles help us move. We labelled our elbow joints, knee joints, hip joints and shoulder joints! Do you know which are hinge joints and which are ball and socket joints?
In History we looked at Hillforts and learnt about palisades and ditches. People lived together to protect their farms from animals and other tribes.
Everyone is showing increasing confidence in their recorder playing. The concert is in just two weeks time -so please keep practising.
Have a wonderful weekend,
Year 3 team
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Nov 292024
Pied Piper, Roundhouses and angles!
We had our final week working on the Pied Piper legend and our powerful descriptions show how well we know this intriguing character. Next week we will move onto the story of the Mousehole Cat by Antonia Barber and using this as inspiration for our English work.
In Maths we learnt what an angle was. It is when two straight lines meet at a point, it is a measure of turn and you can use the words clockwise and anticlockwise to describe them. We drew acute angles, right angles and obtuse angles using geostrips.
Last week we drew the outside of a Roundhouse and labelled it, this week we moved inside and thought about the things we would have found inside. We also thought about what it might have been like to live in a round house.
We continued to create our collages inspired by Matisse and are moving onto making and using stencils.
In RE we did a lot of thinking about why God chose Noah to build the ark. We used a wonderful picture to really help us think about what a mammoth task this would have been!
Everyone is working hard in our recorder lessons. Please continue to practise as the concert is coming up very soon!
Have a wonderful weekend!
Year 3 team.
Nov 222024
What is year 3’s favourite fruit? Why do snakes slither?
Another exciting week in Year 3! We continued to use the Pied Piper of Hamelin as inspiration for our English work. This week we retold the story. Everyone worked hard and we can see real improvement in their punctuation, handwriting and spelling since the start of the year. Well done Year 3.
Did you know that grapes are the top fruit choice for our year group? Our learning has focused on using and creating bar charts. We all did a survey of our favourite fruits and created accurate charts showing the data.
In History we learnt all about roundhouses from archaeological evidence and produced detailed, labelled sketches of their outside features.
In Art we continued our collage work inspired by Matisse cutting out the shapes from our pre painted paper and creating a piece of abstract art.
In Science we thought about the similarities and differences in animal bones and were surprised by our findings. We thought about why fish and snakes can wriggle their bodies more than mammals (a long spine with tiny vertebrae). We looked at X-rays of different animals and sorted them into different groups.
In RE we focused on the story of Noah’s Ark, sequenced the story and wrote about the main events.
Have a wonderful weekend. Don’t forget to practise the recorder pieces. Miss Sassinova is really pleased with their progress but the concert is fast approaching and we want everyone to feel confident.
Year 3 team.
Nov 152024
Year 3 receive an exciting request from the Mayor of Hamelin.
This week we continued to use the legend ‘The Pied Piper’ to inspire our English. On Monday we received a letter from the Mayor of Hamelin. He was in desperate need of help. Hamelin was stuck in the part of the legend when the town was overrun with rats. The mayor asked us to create an advert for a rat catcher. We worked hard all week and made some very eye-catching adverts. The Mayor was grateful because The Pied Piper saw the advert and got rid of the rats with his magical flute playing. Well done Year 3!
In Maths we completed our work on addition and subtraction with fact families and moved onto learning about bar charts. Take a look at our unifix bar charts!
In Science we continued to learn about the bones of the human body. Did you know that without a pelvis we wouldn’t be able to walk? In Art we mixed primary colours to make orange, green and purple. We then painted pieces of sugar paper so that next week we can cut out shapes to make Matisse inspired collages. In History we thought about why people in the Iron Age started to live in houses rather than tents. Finally in RE we learnt that the stories of Jonah and the Whale and Noah’s Ark are sacred stories in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
We hope you have a lovely weekend!
Year 3 team
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Nov 082024
Welcome back!
We are glad to see you all back refreshed and ready to learn. This week we have started lots of new learning. In English we have started reading the Michael Morpurgo version of the Pied Piper and it is inspiring our learning. This week we learnt all about rats: did you know they have such strong teeth that they can bite through glass and metal? We sorted our rat information into groups and created subheadings for each one, we practised using conjunctions to extend our sentences and wrote up our own report about rats.
In Art we started learning about Matisse and how he ‘drew with scissors’ to make huge, colourful collages. Our Homework is all about this amazing artist. In RE we started learning about the story of Jonah and the whale and Noah’s Ark.
In Maths we have been working on complements of numbers that make 100 using a hundred square and fact families. In Science we started our new topic by learning about the bones in our body, why we have bones and what would happen if we didn’t have bones. We all loved creating our own life size skeleton and looking carefully at how they all connect. Take a look at the photos below.
Oct 252024
An interesting week finished with a crazy hair day!
Our final week of this half term! We worked hard on Haikus in English – poems that have the pattern 5-7-5 syllables in each line. We edited them and wrote them up for a class poetry book. Please come and take a look.
In Maths we consolidated using formal column addition and subtraction. Everyone impressed us with their increased accuracy with this way of doing calculations.
Meanwhile in RE we looked at the fifth pillar of Islamic belief – Hajj and talked about how pilgrimages or holy journeys are important in lots of faiths. In History we learnt about Stonehenge and thought about why it was built. We all enjoyed our final Science lesson on Rocks; we looked at soil samples from clay, sand, peat and chalky soils and we sketched what we saw.
We all wish you a restful half term break,
See you on Tuesday 5th November,
The whole Y3 team.
Oct 112024
Stone Age investigations
Week 6 started with a very interesting investigation into what people ate in the Stone Age. We found some leftover Stone Age food and took a close look at it. Each group created a poster of all the different foods we found: oats, grains, mini apples, sweetcorn and also lots of different types of leaves and berries. Check out our photos! We then thought about how Stone Age people found their food exploring the idea of them as hunters and gatherers.
Meanwhile, in English we wrote sentences about Stone Age animals. We worked hard on developing precise and powerful vocabulary that we then used to describe Stone Age animals.In Maths we introduced written column addition and subtraction including exchanging. Everyone worked really hard to set their columns out carefully and start by adding or subtracting the ones first!
We have all made our Christmas cards around the theme Christmas trees. They will be ready for you to order soon. We think you are going to love them.
In RE we learnt about the second pillar of Islam – prayer. We learnt how, where and when they pray and some of us thought about why they pray.
You should have all received an email from Miss Sazanova with links to videos of the songs we are learning. Please practise and please remember to bring in your recorder every Monday.
Have a restful weekend.
Year 3 team
