Welcome back, everyone, to the second half of our Autumn Term. I hope you have had an enjoyable break, despite the wind, and I am delighted to see children return. It is wonderful to observe such a positive attitude towards our next units of work and I’m sure that together, we’ll enjoy the following few weeks as we creep slowly up to the Christmas celebrations which will end this exciting term.
Our new book for this term is The Fox by Margaret Wilde. It’s a wonderful tale which explores friendship and loyalty, betrayal and deceit between the story characters, a fox, a magpie and a dog. We’ve looked at similes this week, ways in which we can describe things by likening them to other things, for example, he is as strong as a bear, she ran like the wind, and so on. Ask your child about the simile poem they composed this week.
We continue to develop our calculation skills with addition and subtraction, this time using a number line to add and subtract, by taking “ten jumps” and “ones jumps” to find the answer to problems. Children should be able to show you how they can use a number line to work out something like 78 – 21 or 52 + 32. We’ve just started on this but I’m impressed with how quickly they are picking this up. Your children really do work hard and they really are wonderful. Any practise you’d like to do at home always helps and please don’t forget to work on those times tables! Children ideally should be entering Year 4 being able to recite 3,4,6,8 times tables confidently. Top Marks is an excellent site and one which children are familiar with, and we love Hit The Button so, if you’re looking for something to do with the tablet, computer or iPad, please give it a go. www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/7-11.
In science, Year 3 are finding out about rocks. They will learn how to compare and group together different rocks. They will learn how to describe how fossils are formed and know that soils are made up from rocks and organic matter. This week children have looked at a collection of rocks, examined different rocks closely to describe what they can see and found out about how igneous rocks are formed. Hopefully children will tell you that igneous rocks, such as granite and pumice, were created from lava. We have also learned about the structure of our wonderful planet. Children should be able to tell you that underneath their feet we have the earth’s crust. Beneath that is the mantle, the outer core and the inner core right at the centre of our planet. We made a paper model to show how this looks.
I hope you enjoy our work.
