Welcome to Giraffes.

We are the Great Giraffes!

This year we are going to be learning lots of new and interesting things, if you want to find out about some of them keep reading below and look on our Seesaw page for updates too.

Our Great Giraffes are safe and kind, follow the Golden Rules and work really hard.

Mr Matthews is our class Teacher.

Mrs Watson is our Teaching Assistant.
Mrs Allam is our Learning Support Assistant.

Here are a few notices you will need for your child in Giraffes.

The main door to Giraffes opens at 8:40am. The school day begins at 8:50am and finishes at 3:20 pm.

Please send your child to school in their (weather appropriate) P.E kit on Tuesdays, another day for P.E will be confirmed asap. Earrings will need to be covered or removed for these lessons.

Please read with your child 3 times or more each week and sign their Reading Record, they will be rewarded Star Stamps for this.

Homework will be set each Friday on Seesaw, please ensure this is sent back before 9am the following Friday.
 

Spellings will be given on EdShed and in your child's Reading Record ready for the spelling quiz held each Friday.
 

School water bottles should be in school each day - please fill these at home.
 

Keep your eyes peeled on Giraffes' class window for updates and further notices.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to come and talk to the adults who work in the class.

During the Autumn term, Year 3 will be reading Floella Benjamin's book – ‘Coming To England’. This will help us learn about the Windrush Generation, what is was like to leave your home country and how it felt to travel to a new land. We will use this text to enable us to write a letter to an imagined family member in Trinidad using our inference skills, feelings also nouns and prepositions to add depth to the letter. To ensure the letter is written with a degree of technicality, we shall also be using inverted commas and direct speech.

Nen And The lonely Fisherman will be the book we use to help us make predictions about a text and to help us become creative writers who can write detailed descriptions. We will also be learning how to understand a character's thoughts and feelings in a text and how the language used can enhance a piece of writing.

Throughout the year, we will be reading a variety of books to help us foster a love of reading. We will be reading a class book as well as having reading lessons. During our reading lessons, we will be using inference and retrieval skills to answer questions about what we have read. We will also be making predictions about texts before reading them. A variety of genres and text types will be read over the year and we will also be sharing our favourite reads with our class through book reviews too.

Our first class story that we voted for and will be reading for pleasure is called "Dave Pigeon' by Swapna Haddow.

Giraffes will be learning all about words and the spelling rules they have, we will be learning about diagraphs and trigraphs, prefixes and suffixes and what happens to the root word when these are added. To help us with these spelling rules, some of us will also be taking part in a phonics intervention to help boost our confidence when spelling words. A spelling quiz will take place weekly on the words we have learnt. 

In our Maths lessons, Giraffes will be learning all about Place Value up to 1000, we will be partitioning numbers, using number lines and representations of the numbers to help us understand their value.

Later in the term, we will be moving on to Addition and Subtraction, during these lessons we will be ordering numbers, subtracting across 1, 10 and 100, and exchanging when subtracting. We will also be learning how to divide and multiply numbers using a range of strategies.

Our Changing World and Amazing Bodies are our two topic areas for the Autumn term in Science.

During Our Changing World, we will be looking outside at trees, leaves, seeds and plants to see how the seasons affect what we can see and how the plants themselves adapt to the weather conditions. We hope to observe insects too to see if the weather means we see different insects at different times of the year.

When we are learning about Amazing Bodies, we will begin to understand what makes a meal healthy and what vitamins and minerals are important to help keep a human healthy. We will learn about different parts of the human skeleton and names of muscles too. At the end of this unit we will conduct an investigation to show how fitness and being healthy can help a body complete activities.

Health and Happy Relationships will be the focus for this term in RSHE.

Giraffes will be taking part in lessons that will promote the importance of happy friendships, highlight the need for good values within a friendship and the ways in which we can build resilience to help us with any friendship difficulties we may face. We will further develop our listening skills, respect for others and learn about personal space boundaries and why these are important. Further to this we will be looking at Equality and Diversity, what this means and what the benefits are of living in a diverse community. E-safety will also be discussed in our RSHE lessons, we will learn how to keep ourselves safe when online, how we can respond to hurtful behaviours and how we should report any incidences of this. During SRE we will be looking at the ways we can keep ourselves clean and how not to spread germs.

My World- Where Am I? Is the question we will be answering in our Geography lessons. Year 3 will be using maps and a range of resources to find our place within the UK, what countries there are in the UK and what the different regions are and how they differ. We will be discussing the differences and similarities of places and looking at their human and physical features. Later in the term, we will be using compasses and maps to help us follow directions and understand grid references on a map.

William Morris and the Victorian Arts and Craft Movement will be what our Art lessons will be about in the Autumn term. We will learn about William Morris, what he liked to draw and use this information to help us recreate a sketch in his style. We will also be producing a block print inspired by his designs, which have been used to inspire wallpaper designs up to the present day.

Creating Media - Desk Top Publishing- will be the focus for our computing lessons this term. We will be producing documents using Publisher, we will be learning how to add images, edit the layout, include page settings, and add content to a document using a range of tools.

Religious Beliefs and Questions will be explored during our RE lessons. A understanding of the different beliefs and thoughts surrounds Christians and Science and the question of Creation will be an area of discussion. We will also be learning about religious festivals and celebrations such as: Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and Harvest. Later in the year, we will be finding out about Jesus and the difference he makes to Christians and the impact the church has on Christians and their faith.

During our music lessons, we will be listening to a range of music and learning lots of songs. We will have the opportunity to play a variety of musical instruments and we will be learning how to write down music.

We are very lucky to have a wide variety of sports coaches who deliver exciting and interesting P.E lessons. This term Giraffes will be working on our movement skills as part of our gymnastics coaching.

Giraffes will be learning French this term. We will be learning how to introduce ourselves and how to count to 10 too.

During our DT lessons, Year 3 will be eating seasonal foods, understanding where in the world food comes from, learning all about seasonal foods and how these are produced. We will also be understanding how to follow a recipe and what ingredients are needed to make tarts later in the year.