We’re sure you agree that although half-term was fun, it’s even better to be back learning! This week saw the advent of our new topic: Survival. The clue’s in the name – it’s all about how humans and animals survive, in many different ways.
In English, we’ve been doing some sentence-level work based around The Journey, the enthralling short story by Francesca Sanna. We began the week by looking at the front cover of the story and developing our questioning skills before taking an in-depth look at the character of the narrator and identifying her emotions over the following days. The week culminated in us writing a character description, which will form the basis of our writing over the coming weeks.
In maths, we began our addition topic by practising some different strategies for mental addition. We’ll continue this over the next few weeks, adding numbers up to 999, so that when we begin column addition and subtraction later in the half-term, we’ll have a lot of tricks up our sleeve to help us out. The week’s maths ended with us answering word problems and then writing our own – turns out Mr Connolly has been eating a lot of biscuits! Some of our maths lessons this week had worksheets, while some were based on journalling – all of them had challenges, so you can view the worksheets and the challenges here if you’d like to have another go. Maths Aut 2 W1 sheets
Our second science morning introduced our new topic: sound. We walked in silence all around the school, stopping to sit and listen for all the sounds we could hear. There were some very loud spaces, while others, like the library and the classrooms, were very quiet – we added up what we had recorded in a tally chart and then wrote about all we knew and had learnt about sound. Our challenge question – “is there such a thing as silence?” – prompted some rather profound answers!
In guided reading, we began Race to the Frozen North by Catherine Johnson. This is an exciting and challenging text that tells the real-life story of Matthew Henson, one of the first Americans to reach the North Pole, but also one you may not have heard of.
The big event of the week took place on Thursday, which was of course Diwali, celebrated across the world. We celebrated it across our school on Thursday evening – thank you to everyone that came along and happy Diwali to everyone.
Wishing you all a restful weekend.
Year 3 Team
Reminders:
As the weather gets colder, please can everyone remember to bring a warm coat to school. Gloves, scarves and hats can also be worn at playtimes and lunch times.
Please remember that children or adults need to write in the reading record every week.
Next Week:
In English, we will be writing newspaper reports with The Journey as our stimulus, allowing us to have a look at all the grammar that comes with them, predominantly past tense.
In maths, we progress further into addition, looking mostly at using the adjusting strategy to add 2-digit numbers and later 3.