Birkby Junior School

Welcome Back Year 3! We can’t quite believe we are already in the final term of this academic year and it won’t be long before we start preparing our classes for transition to Year 4. We have lots of interesting and exciting learning planned for the last part of the school year and can’t wait to share it with you.

In English lessons we will explore the book Gregory Cool and then move onto exploring the poetry of Valerie Bloom’s Hot Like Fire. We hope they will enthuse and engage the Year 3 children in their learning so that they understand more about other parts of the world e.g. the Caribbean Islands, their cultures and history. Both these texts will develop skills in reading and writing for example exploring figurative language in poetry and encouraging pupils to use it themselves in their own poetry whilst Gregory Cool will help to secure children’s inference skills as they put themselves in the shoes of the main character Gregory who is a long way from home for the first time! In the second half of the term we will introduce the children to a new text, The Boy who grew Dragons. This was extremely popular with the children in Year 3 last year due to its humorous and interesting story full of fantastical and exciting events. Year 3 will continue to strengthen their writing skills by completing a range of written pieces of work such as guides on how to grow dragons; narrative pieces focusing on dialogue and non-chronological reports about dragons.

Focused reading sessions will continue to take place during the week to support the children with their text retrieval skills as well as developing their knowledge of inference and how to infer thoughts, feeling and motives of character. There will also be weekly cracking comprehension sessions taught so that our classes can explore and understand a range of fiction and non-fiction texts. Please remember to read as much at home with your child as every pupil in school will bring home their ‘home reading books’ to share. Please try to find time to read as often as possible: any opportunity to share and discuss books will help your child to become a better reader and develop their love of reading. Even if your child is a confident reader, finding time to read at home will strengthen important comprehension skills such as prediction, summarising and inference, as well as broadening their understanding of vocabulary and language used by authors. For some children in Year 3, decoding skills still need to be practised at home. If so, they will bring home a decodable book to help them practice the sounds they have been taught in phonics lessons. Don’t worry if they also bring home another book for sharing, this is a book you can read and enjoy with people at home – lets work together to develop good attitudes towards reading!

In Maths we will be covering lots of concepts and areas of learning such as Measurements (Mass, Time and Capacity); Money; Shape and their properties and finally Statistics. Through our work on Money, we will develop your child’s understanding of amounts of money, both pounds and pence, and focus on mastering their calculation skills by adding and subtracting amounts of money. In our Time unit, we will be exploring new concepts which the children in Year 3 need to understand before the end of the year e.g. telling the time to the nearest 5 minutes and understanding the concepts of months, years, days. When we learn about Shape, we will be teaching the children about the properties of 2D shapes and polygons and how to identify different types of angles; parallel and perpendicular lines. Later in the term there will be a focus on statistics and data presented in different ways e.g. pictograms, bar charts and two way tables so that Year 3 can interpret and present data using these formats. Daily, we will continue to develop fluency and recall skills of known facts and will be securing recall of 3, 4 and 8 x table facts through quick, fun games and activities such as Fluent in 5. We hope you continue to use Mathletics and Times Table Rockstars at home as a fun way to improve your child’s mental maths skills.

Within our Geography lessons this term we will be learning about the county of France and exploring our school themes of Location, Place, Relationships, Movement and Regions. We will continue to develop map skills by learning about France’s location within the World and its continent - Europe. Exploring elements of French culture and tourism will help Year 3 to understand what is special and interesting about the country so that they can make comparisons with other countries they are already familiar with. Later in the Summer Term, the majority of our lessons will focus on physical geography through our work on Mountains. Firstly, we will teach Year 3 to know the differences between mountains and hills and also where in the UK we have them before moving on to lessons about how these are formed. These lessons will allow the children to make links with learning in other subject areas e.g. our Spring Term Science unit of Rocks and Soils and English work on Pebble in my Pocket. As the half term progresses, we will continue to learn about famous mountain ranges in France and again make comparisons with those more local to us as well as those in other parts of the World.

Our budding scientists in Year 3 will enjoy taking part in work around Light and Shadow. This unit will explore what Light and Dark is and how shadows are formed as a result; investigative work will help to secure understanding of these concepts for example observing how shadows change throughout the day. Learning about reflections will also be an important part of this topic so that the children know that light is reflected from surfaces; the best type of surfaces for reflecting light and how light moves when it is being reflected. We will finish off the Science work for the year with a final unit of work around working scientifically. We will strengthen important investigative skills such prediction, recording results, writing methods and making conclusions so that they are ready for the Science learning in Year 4.

The Summer Term is a great time to get outside and practise becoming better athletes in PE for example developing athletic skills of sprinting, throwing, jumping and relay racing. Let’s hope the sun shines so we can get outside each week! Other PE lessons will involve learning more about team work and the skills and rules involved in a variety of sports for examples: net and wall sports and invasion games. Another unit we have planned is Orienteering: a fanastic unit of work which develops team work and communication skills through lessons which teach Year 3 to read and follow maps to solve problems. 

There will be so much learning happening during this term! Please check our Summer curriculum booklet for more information on the rest of the curriculum as we have some amazing units of work planned in other subject areas as well e.g. Colour and Print work and working with clay in Art; Working with textiles and joining them together to make hand puppets in DT; our multimedia project using PowerPoint in Computing, as well as Coding using Discovery Education; families and communities in PSHE; what religions teach people about the importance of learning a good life in RE; using Glockenspiels in Music and finally how to play games in French and give our opinions about them.

We know that everything we have planned for the Summer Term will result in a great end to an interesting school year. We are incredibly proud of our Year 3 children and how well they settled into life at Birkby Junior School in the past year and will miss them greatly when they move to Year 4.