Welcome to Year 3! 

It's so lovely to have you all back in school and ready to learn again! 

The Year 3 team

Mrs Rous - Class teacher 3R (email: alex.rous@racemeadow.org)

Mrs Ballinger - Class teacher 3B (email: julie.ballinger@racemeadow.org)

Mrs Skilleter - Year 3 Learning Support Assistant

 

During the current COVID19 situation, please use school emails to contact us about any non-urgent issues.

Anything more urgent can be passed to us via the main school office. 

Key information

• Diaries and reading books should be in school every day.
• Water bottles will be sent home everyday to be washed and refilled. 
• Children can bring in their own pencil cases which should be left in school.
• Please provide a healthy snack (fruit, cereal bar, cheese etc) as we are unable to provide tuck at the moment and the fruit scheme does not apply to KS2 children.   

 

Thursday is PE day and children should have a change of footwear, under present COVID conditions, children will not be getting changed into a full PE kit, but they must have trainers or pumps to change into. They will be learning sports that require no contact such as dance and fitness while restrictions remain in place. Swimming will not take place for Year 3 children for the foreseeable future.

Homework will be given out on a Friday and should be handed in by the following Wednesday. Homework consists of Arithmetic, Grammar and a short reading activity. Homework should be completed in pencil or a black or blue pen. Children will be awarded team points for completed homework pieces. In addition to this, children are expected to have read at home 3 times each week and have this signed by an adult in their diary.

Weekly spellings are stuck in the spellings section at the front of your child's diary, new spellings are given out on a Friday and will be tested on the following Friday. 

Autumn 1

Mini Mission 1 - Charlie Small Gorilla City

 

Throughout this mini mission in English, we will be learning how to write a detailed description of the rainforest using effective adjectives, verbs, adverbs and sentence openers. In Geography we will learn the location of the 7 continents and the 5 oceans of the world and will look closely at the rainforest biome, its layers and its importance. We will use natural materials in Art to create a print that represents the rainforest. 

One morning, Year 3 arrived at school to find that there were vines and creepers in the classroom! There were parrots, a frog and a monkey too! Then a letter arrived from someone called Charlie's mum asking for help to find her lost son, Charlie! After that a cut up picture arrived with a note asking which ocean someone had sailed over! Things were getting curious...the map was a map of the world which we used to find out where Charlie could have gone. Wherever could he be? Mrs Collinson gave us a book to read all about Charlie Small, we discovered that he had been struck by lightning while sailing his raft down the stream at the bottom of his garden. We can't wait to find out more! 

One morning, Year 3 arrived at school to find that there were vines and creepers in the classroom! There were parrots, a frog and a monkey too! Then a letter arrived from someone called Charlie's mum asking for help to find her lost son, Charlie! After that a cut up picture arrived with a note asking which ocean someone had sailed over! Things were getting curious...the map was a map of the world which we used to find out where Charlie could have gone. Wherever could he be? Mrs Collinson gave us a book to read all about Charlie Small, we discovered that he had been struck by lightning while sailing his raft down the stream at the bottom of his garden. We can't wait to find out more! 

Part of our Art and Design learning was to investigate the different tints and tones that you might see in artwork inspired by the rainforest. We investigated tints and tones of green - from the variety of leaves found in the rainforest. As William Morris was an artist that began to produce wallpaper with leaves, birds and flowers, we used his artwork as a starting point for investigating colour and printing.

Mini-Mission 2

Jim and the beanstalk

We received a letter from a giant...

After reading his story, the giant then sent some challenges for Year 3 to complete. 

Challenge #1 - Explain the role of the various parts of the plant.

Challenge#2 - Explain how water is transported through a plant. 

Challenge #3 - Explain the role of a flower in pollination. 

Challenge #4 - Explain the different types of seed dispersal. 

 

He was a very demanding giant!! We put all of our explanations together into a book to explain everything that we learned about flowering plants.

Have a look... 👀

Mini-Mission 3

Funnybones 

There was a story in the local paper about a group of archaeologists finding some bones. They needed help in finding out the age of the person that the bones belonged to. They needed some primary school children to measure their bones to help them. We measured our cranium (skull), radius (one of the bones in the lower arm) and our tibia (one of the bones that connects the knee to the ankle). We put our measurements in a bar graph so that we could compare our bone lengths. we found out that even though Year 3 children are of a similar age, our bone lengths are different. However, we did discover that the measurements fell within a range so that we could tell the archaeologists that if the bones were between these ranges then the person whose bones they were could be aged between 7 and 8 years old. If they were shorter then the owner would be younger and older if the bones were longer. Good detective work!  

Throughout Science during this mini mission, we learned about the function of our skeleton and the names of the major bones in it. When we looked at the way in which the skeleton fits together we discovered that there were three different types of joints in the skeleton that help us to move in different ways. Hinge joints, sliding joints and ball and socket joints. 

We also learned about the different food groups that our bodies need in order to stay healthy and which ones that we should eat less of. We designed our own healthy meal to show our choices of these food groups. 

In English, we developed our use of conjunctions to sequence, join or explain using the Funnybones story book as a stimulus. We also learned how to group information together to write paragraphs around a main idea or theme. We used this learning and our knowledge of food groups from our science learning to produce an information poster about healthy eating.  

For our Design and Technology project, we used our knowledge of how bones work to make a working model of a hand to prove that ligaments are needed to move the joints. 

We investigated hinge joints and ball and socket joints to understand how they work in different ways. 

 

Our design used straws to represent the bones and string for the ligaments. Once completed, we attached elastic bands to the ends of the string. When you pull on the bands the ligaments are stretched and this makes the fingers move at the joints. When the ligaments are relaxed the joints move back. Pictured below are two examples of the finished 'bionic' hand.