Year 3

Hello! Welcome to Year 3. Year 3 consists of two classes; the Hawthorns and the Rowans. Mrs Hughes and Mrs Dunham will be teaching the Hawthorns. Mr Vint will be teaching the Rowans. 

Our main topics that we cover in Year 3 are: volcanoes, The Stone Age, The Bronze Age and The Iron Age, India compared with Ipswich, The Romans, Antarctica and Ancient Egypt. 

This year, we will spend a lot of time learning mathematical methods to solve questions involving the four operations, as well as becoming fluent with our multiplication and division facts for our 3x, 4x and 8x tables. This is building on our knowledge of the times tables learnt in Year 2 (2x, 5x and 10x tables). It is an expectation in Year 3 that children spend 10 minutes per week on TTRockstars for homework, to practice times table facts. 

In English lessons, we will focus on making our sentences more complex, by including fronted adverbials at the start of sentences, as well as using expanded noun phrases. We also focus on learning about conjunctions and how these elongate sentences, by joining two ideas together. Many of our English units focus on an exciting, beautiful story to hook us into the learning. Some of these books are; Silly Billy (Anthony Browne), Stone Age Boy (Satoshi Kitamura), Arthur and the Golden Rope (Joe Todd-Stanton), Little People, Big Dreams Ernest Shackleton (Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara). 

Reading lessons in Year 3 use many exciting age-appropriate books that will hopefully inspire children to read longer, more complicated chapter stories. It is the expectation that children read with an adult 5x per week at home, earning their Reading Rewards in the process. We build on our comprehension and fluency from Year 2, but will be answering more complex questions, using the text as evidence in our answers. 

We will also learn many other new skills throughout Year 3 including beginning to learn Spanish in our Modern Foreign Language lessons; improving our DT skills in our topics of 3D model making, sewing and food technology; learning many different Science topics (plants, rocks and fossils, magnets). 

The school motto, ‘Do it right, Do it well, Do it’, ensures we are ready for some amazing learning adventures! Not a moment will be wasted during your time in Year 3. We are beginning your learning journey in Key Stage 2, and therefore have high expectations of both learning and behaviour throughout Year 3, in preparation for your time in KS2 at Cliff Lane Primary.