One Family

Little People, Big Dreams

Year 3

Work hard, dream big, never give up!

Year 3 is a big year for our Kader family. It marks the beginning of our KS2 journey and there’s lots of change- a new playground, new corridors, new routines. It doesn’t take long for us to find our stride and settle in and we very quickly realise that we are totally ready for the challenges of a new phase!

Steady away…

Autumn term in Year 3, just like any other year, is all about embedding routine to get us comfortable and settled and ready to learn in a new environment. Although we have moved across the school, a detailed transition between our KS1 and KS2 staff means our teachers already know us inside out: what makes us ‘tick’; what we enjoy; what we need to help us grow as learners.

D.A.R.T at the heart…

At Kader, we know that in order to make ideas ‘stick’ we have to revisit them repeatedly. Every day, within all of our lessons, we have Dedicated Active Recall Time (or D.A.R.T!) which involves us completing activities to revise prior learning. We know that we can actively make our brains grow by doing this and we love to see our knowledge-base expand as a result. Our knowledge organisers help us to recap learning across our topics and we are building a wealth of strategies to learn key facts, dates, words and methods of learning.

Books, books, books…

Like in other year groups across school, we LOVE it when our learning all links together as it helps us to make vital links, joins and connections between the knowledge we acquire.

 Each topic we learn runs for a half-term and around this, we have built a Book Spine to help us strengthen our understanding of other curriculum areas. Our texts are carefully selected to give us a range of reading experiences, from a wealth of genres and authors. This helps us to embed our learning in other areas of the curriculum and develop our vocabulary bank, since the books we use are so rich in language. During our Whole Class Reading sessions, we use quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry to transport us to other worlds and to help us become proficient readers with a breadth of materials. Each day, we use carefully planned resources to help us to develop our reading skills as well as our fluency and stamina. Those of us still on our decoding journey use Read Write Inc, just like in KS1, to help develop our phonemic awareness, as well as our comprehension skills.

 

We are all exposed to ambitious vocabulary within the books we meet and we love using drama and speaking and listening activities endorsed by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Power of Reading to get ‘language on its feet’. We find that no word is too challenging for us and the more we can ‘talk them’, the more we can write them; the more we can apply them, the more likely we are to have secured them for use in our everyday encounters both now and in later life.

Our maths vision…

Our mathematics’ vision is to promote curiosity, enjoyment and a love and thirst for challenge and learning. It is ambitious and creative, empowering us to become independent, resilient and successful mathematicians. We strive to develop a life-long love of learning mathematics and the skills to play an active, creative and responsible role in society.

 

Maths learning in Year 3, just like every other year group, ensures that we gain both mathematical fluency  and the ability to apply our skills to reasoning-based problems. We use online platforms (Conquer Maths and Times Table Rockstars) to supplement our work in school and to ensure we constantly revisit maths facts to embed them further. Year 3 is a super important year in regards to the childrens’ maths’ journeys with the introduction of column methods to support calculations. It is important that children get this correct now in order to transition seamlessly to years 4, 5 and 6. This can be supported by parents following the school’s calculation policy in regards to how to ‘set-out’ these sums. (Refer to Conquer Maths video tutorials for column addition, subtraction and multiplication for examples of this.)

Helping at home…

We work incredibly hard at school and so down-time with family is very important. At home however, we can utilise the online platform of Conquer Maths to support our learning, since we know that the more we do at home, the more confident we will be in class and the greater our chance of success. 

 

We also know that reading for 20minutes a day is so vitally important. At this stage in our reading journey, we need 20 minutes each day to ensure that we become more fluent and can read with both pace and expression. The best way to develop this is with an adult who can listen, question and provide a good reading role model, sometimes echoing sentences back to us so we can hear what it should sound like. You might also ask us some questions as we read together to make sure we understand.

Writing...

Budding authors…

We start our writing learning journey by examining our writing genre and what great examples look like so we always have a fantastic model in our heads before we write. We are always mindful of our purpose for writing and our intended audience- why we are writing and for who. Because our English curriculum is built around incredible books, we know that we can make our writing come alive with the language choices we make. We use drama wherever we can to bring our ideas to life so that we never face a blank page without some ideas of what to write. We use literature to explore sentence types that authors use and discuss the effect of them on the reader. We then independently learn how to use and apply these sentence types into our own writing to produce writing that we are very proud of. We know that we can always improve and we are always happy to find and fix marvellous mistakes that we make as part of the editing process. We are amazing little authors!

Year 3 Teachers

Miss Chan
Mr Jukes
Miss Gooding
Miss Blackwood

Autumn Term

 

Tribal Tales

Mighty Metals

Spring Term

Gods and Mortals

The children have the opportunity to learn all about the Ancient Greeks.
They:

  • Research the Greek Gods and Goddesses
  • Learn about daily life in Ancient Greece
  • Experience some of the sports from the Ancient Greek Olympics
  • Compare their lifestyle to that of the Ancient Greek

Predator


This week we were visited by Some animals from Kirkleatham Owl Centre. We met William the tawny owl, Alien the python, Marshmallow and MacDonalds the rats, Violet the tarantula and Ozzy the Duck!

Can your children tell which are predators and which are prey?

Summer Term

 

Flow

We are learning all about how important rivers are. We have visited the River Tees and cruised along it on the Teesside Princess. Then we visited the Tees Barrage.

Tremors

Children will be learning all about volcanoes around the world, what causes them and the devastation they can bring.
They:

  • Explore the world’s most famous volcanoes and look at the Ring of Fire
  • Discover how volcanoes erupt and the causes
  • Investigate different types of rocks and their properties.

Latest Year 3 News

Year 3 – What We Did This Week W/B 27/11/2023

Year 3 – What We Did This Week W/B 27/11/2023

Year 3 This week we have been investigating magnetic poles. After making our predictions, we used real magnets to test if our predictions were true. We experimented with a variety of different shaped magnets including magnets which were not labelled with their north...

Year 3 – What We Did This Week W/B 06/11/2023

Year 3 – What We Did This Week W/B 06/11/2023

This week we have looked at different forces as part of our new ‘Mighty Metals’ topic. We have compared how things move on different surfaces and that some forces need contact between 2 objects. We changed the surface and the elevation of the object to compare if this...

Year 3 – What We Did This Week W/B 02/10/2023

Year 3 – What We Did This Week W/B 02/10/2023

As part of our science lesson we have been looking at vertebrate and invertebrate and sorting out which animals are classified as each! We have had lots of fun this week learning our class poem and performing it in school.