Welcome to Giraffes class!
We are the genius giraffes and we are a Year 3 class.
Our teacher is Mr Matthews and our Teaching Assistants are Mrs Watson and Miss Fox.
Writing:
Our Writing learning will continue to follow the ‘Pathways to Write’ scheme. In the first half-term, our learning will be inspired by the text ‘Journey’ by Aaron Becker which is an adventure narrative. We will focus on learning how to use the present perfect form of verbs in contrast to the past tense ; use prepositions, conjunctions and adverbs to express time, place and cause; group related ideas into paragraphs and use ‘a’ or ‘an’ according to whether the next word begins with a vowel or a consonant. This will build up to us writing our own adventure story!
In Summer 2, our writing will be inspired by the text ‘Zeraffa Giraffa’ by Diane Hoffmeyer which is based on the true story of Zeraffa the giraffe and her life. We will focus on learning how to build an increasing range of sentence structures ; in non-narrative material, use simple organisational devices including headings and sub-headings to aid presentation and use present and past tenses correctly and consistently including the progressive and present perfect forms. Our Writing outcome will be to plan an write a persuasive guide for visiting Zeraffa at the Jardin Des Plantes in Paris!
Grammar:
Our Grammar learning will continue to follow the ‘Grammarsaurus place value of learning scheme’ where we will be deepening our understanding of how to build single-clause sentences whilst using pronouns. We will also be learning about subjects and verbs and using co-ordinating conjunctions to join clauses and compound subjects.
Reading:
In the Spring Term, Year 3 will be continue to explore a range of fiction and non-fiction texts from Grammarsaurus’s ‘Comprehension Crusher’ resources. Our Non-fiction (information texts) will help us learn about the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans; the explanation texts ‘How were the dead mummified in ancient Egypt? and ‘Why do we have four seasons?’ and the information texts ‘igneous rocks’ and ‘deciduous and evergreen trees’.
Our fiction texts will include the narratives ‘the royal escape’ and ‘escape the fire’; stories with historical figures in ‘Jane’s jungle journey’ and ‘Florence Nightingale’ before concluding with the entertaining performance poems of ‘the centipede song’ and ‘the tummy beast’.
Some children will explore other texts as part of their learning, as well as continuing to develop their Phonic knowledge.
We will assess our reading progress by undertaking regular ‘Bugclub’ assessments.
Spelling:
In our Spelling lessons, we will learning about challenge words that do not follow regular spelling patterns; words ending with the suffix ‘er’; words where the digraph 'ch' makes a /k/ sound; words ending in '-gue' and '-que'; words where the digraph 'sc' makes a /s/ sound and words that are homophones.
In the second half-term, we will be learning about more challenge words that do not follow regular spelling patterns; words ending in ‘-sion’ before revising a range of spelling rules and words we have learned this year.
Maths:
Upon completion of our capacity and measures learning, Year 3 will begin the term by learning more about fractions; money including adding, subtracting and converting between pounds and pence and then learning about time including telling the time, using AM and PM and knowing Roman Numerals up to 12.
In the second half-term, we will be learning about 2d shapes including their properties, angles and lines. We will then focus on statistics and how data can be represented including bar charts, pictograms and 2-way tables.
Science:
Our Science learning in the Summer Term will be ‘Flowering plants and plant growth’ in Summer 1, followed by ‘The life cycle of flowering plants’ in Summer 2. In the first half term, Year 3 will learn about the role function of leaves, stems, roots, the parts of a flowering plant and why plants need space to grow successfully. In the second half term we will know what pollination is and the different ways this can occur as well as different methods of seed dispersal in plants, fruits and vegetables.
History:
As our Summer Term topic is ‘Ancient Egypt: What made it so successful?’, our History learning will be an important part of this term. We will begin by finding out the answer to the question ‘How did Early Egypt begin and what was it like there?’ before moving on to knowing more about the ‘Old Kingdom’ including beliefs in Ancient gods and the afterlife, the role of the pyramids and significant changes as a result of the transition to the New Kingdom.
RSHE:
In RSHE, Year 3 will continue to link our ‘Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds’ learning whilst developing our knowledge of how to make healthy choices and dealing with feelings. In our equality and inclusion learning, we will be exploring the topic of including everyone and know that there is a protected characteristic of sexual orientation. Our No Outsiders lesson will be based around ‘The Hueys and The new Jumper’ this text will help us learn how to help outsiders feel welcome. Planet Omar will help us to consider what it is like living in Britain today. As always, we will continue to learn about online safety and will become knowledgeable about the ways technology can be used to sadly bully others and strategies to address this.
Geography:
Our Geography learning will be based on the topic of ‘The conservation of bees’. We will learn about the importance of bees nationally and within our school environment. We will undertake fieldwork to investigate conservation strategies and record our findings as geographers.
Art:
In Art, our artist focus will be Georges Seurat. We will find out more about who he was and explore his style of art before learning more about the pointillism style whilst developing our skills of using different colours, shading and how other effects can be created.
Computing:
In computing, upon completion of our Computer systems and networks learning, Year 3 will be learning about events and actions in programming, including how to fix bugs and adapt a programme to a new context. In Summer 2, we will be learning about stop frame animations as part of our ‘Creating Media’ topic. We will know what an animation is, plan an animation and create this before reviewing and evaluating it.
RE:
Year 3 will be exploring the topic of Inspirational People From The Past. As part of our RE lessons we will be building upon our knowledge of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. We will learn about: who Abraham was, Moses and The Ten Commandments, The 10 Plagues and the miracles of Jesus and how Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed are inspirational people.
Music:
Our music lessons will see us exploring the structure of songs, the patterns within songs and improvising using our voices and instruments. During the topic Enjoying Improvisation, we will be learning and performing songs such as ‘He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands’ and Panda Extravaganza. Opening Night will see us learning the songs, ‘Michael Row The Boat’ and ‘The Dragon Song.’ Keep your eyes peeled on Seesaw for videos of our progress.
PE:
Our PE days will remain as Wednesday mornings (outdoors) and Thursday afternoons (indoors) and pupils may come to school in their PE kits. Our PE topics for Summer will include Attacking and Defending/Passing a ball; Dance; Gymnastics and Athletics/Sports Day preparation.
MFL:
During the Summer Term, Year 3 will be continuing to build upon our French vocabulary. The two topic areas we shall be covering are: Les Glaces (Ice Creams) and Les Legumes (Vegetables). By the end of the topic Les Glaces we will have learnt the names of ten flavours of ice cream, explored the determiners- ‘a’ and ‘the’ and placed these Wonderful Words into sentences in French. At the end of Les Legumes (Vegetables) we will be able to identify ten infinitive verbs and say whether we like or dislike the verb and write these in the written form.
D&T:
Design and Technology lessons in Summer 2 will see Year 3 building a castle. We shall be recognising how multiple shapes (2d and 3d) are combined to form a strong and stable structure, designing a castle using 3d nets and then constructing and evaluating our final product.