Hello year 3 and families! We hope you are all well. Parents, you may have seen that a list of useful resources has been added to the school website to help you with some activities to help your child with their learning at home. Below you will find some more activities specific to Year 3 that will help continue some of the things we have been doing in class.

By Miss Beddoes

This won’t come as much of a surprise to you all but the best thing you can possibly do is to read, read, read and read some more! When reading at home, there are lots of things you can be thinking about: comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, word reading…the list is endless!

Become a more fluent reader and develop your word reading skills by listening to an adult read. Choose a short passage from a book – avoid a passage that contains a lot of dialogue – and ask an adult to read it to you the whole way through without stopping and listen to how it sounds. Listen to where they place emphasis and which words they stress, take notice of how they use punctuation to inform their reading and notice how the volume and pace changes depending on whether something is scary, sad or funny. Then practice reading aloud and making your reading sound like the adult’s. It will take practise and you might need to place some sticky notes on the page with marks on to remind you to emphasise certain words or take a longer pause. The aim is to make yourself sound great to listen to. Record yourself and see what you sound like! Spend half an hour a day maximum on this and at the end of the week perform to someone in your family or send a video to me! Another great way to develop your fluency is to learn poems off by heart as they will help you become experts in getting a text to sound great when read aloud. Great websites for poetry are: https://clpe.org.uk/poetryline https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/children https://poetryroundabout.com/

If you are lucky enough to have a poetry book bought for you or you have some pocket money and want to buy one yourself, look at the list of poetry books that Pie Corbett has put together: https://world-shop.scholastic.co.uk/poetry-spine

As well as developing your fluency and word reading skills, you can develop your comprehension skills and vocabulary knowledge.

Comprehension should be happening all the time so don’t just think you need to answer some questions about the text when you are finished. Also, make sure the text you are choosing is a challenging one, it is not hard to comprehend an easy text! Here is some guidance for your parents on age appropriate Year 3 books: https://www.guidingreaders.com/year_group/year-3/

When reading, pause at regular intervals and ask yourself questions and/or summarise what you have just read so that you can monitor your own comprehension. If you can’t ask or answer question and you can’t summarise what you have read don’t carry on, go back and read again, go sentence by sentence if necessary.

Remember to also use the 5Ps when reading:

· Patterns and Connections (what patterns do you see within this book or between this and other books)

· Point of View (what is your opinion on the book/ the story/ the characters etc.)

· Puzzles (is there anything that you find confusing?)

· Picture (what is the bigger picture of this book e.g. the moral of the story? What are you picturing in your head?)

· Prediction (what do you think might happen in this story/ to the main character?)

Remember the 5Ps can be worked through in any order, you don’t have to do them all but they are just a starting point to get you thinking and talking about what you have read.

Also, remember to explore vocabulary both in your reading and everyday life. The more words you know and understand, the better! You’ll need to really explore words properly to get them to stick. You can play fun games like Charades, Scrabble and Pictionary to help develop your vocabulary knowledge.

Finally, if you feel extremely confident about a text, ask an adult to ask your or write down some questions for you to have a go at.

In regards to writing, the best thing you can possibly do during this time is to tune in every weekday from 9:30 – 10:30 to listen to Pie Corbett (the man who created Talk for Writing) and his friends deliver a writing workshop with lots of fun activities for you to have a go at. Pie reads out great writing live on air so let’s see if all of Year 3 can get a mention on there! Visit: www.radioblogging.net

Remember you can ask a family member to email me any writing that you would like me to see, I am always happy to receive wonderful pieces of writing!

I am currently working on a spelling project so there will be more information coming your way soon. For now, there is information for your parents to look at in regards to spelling on the school website.

By Mrs Hadley

We have been making great progress this year, so please continue to practise your times table facts including division facts and scaling (when we multiply the root facts by 10 or 100. E.g. 2 x 3 = 6 so, 20 x 3 = 60 or 20 x 30 = 600).

Remember we are working through our multiplication clubs in this order:

30 Club facts = x2, x5, x10 45

Club facts = 30 Club & x 3, x4

56 Club = 45 Club & x6, x8

63 Club facts = 56 Club & x7, x9

88 Club facts = 63 Club & x11, x12 

Challenge Target = Can you learn all the multiplication and division facts for the 63 Club by the summer term? (This means knowing all the answers fluently. Time yourself to check you are getting quicker).

How to learn multiplication and division facts fluently:

· Daily chanting e.g. one 2 is 2, two 2’s are 4 etc…

· Number Rolling – visit our Yr 3 videos on the school website, also here is the link we use in class for the other multiplication tables https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=jf2BHuSbt_Y

· DoodleTables, Hit the Button and Times Table Rockstars (you can access this through the website https://ttrockstars.com/ or download the app.

Continue working on your Doodle Maths activities. I will be sending you some added extras over the coming weeks on key learning topics. Again remember you can get to this through the website https://www.doodlemaths.com/ or through the app.

Parents, I have put together a list of great websites that children can go on to develop their maths skills in engaging interactive ways. Many of these sites provide a range of mathematical games, others provide worksheets if you wish to print anything out. I hope you will find them useful.

DoodleMaths and DoodleTables (everything and tailored to your child) ·

Primary Games Arena (games) https://primarygamesarena.com/Subjects/Maths  ·

Hit the Button (times tables and number bonds) https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button  ·

Math is Fun (worksheets) http://mathsisfun.com  ·

Maths Dictionary ( http://amathsdictionaryforkids.com ) ·

Nrich Games and Interactives https://nrich.maths.org/9086  ·

Maths Zone (portal to lots of maths games and quizzes) www.mathszone.co.uk  ·

Topmarks (lots of fun games to play with children of all ages) www.topmarks.co.uk  ·

Primary Resources (oldie but a goodie!) www.primaryresources.co.uk 

(Please note that the Target Tracker Year 3 statements on the school website will support you to understand the Year 3 expectations, so any work you do is at the right level)

Over the coming weeks I was intending to teach the following areas of mathematics. Most of these are quite practical, so would be ideal topics to cover with home learning.

Time – we have already made a good start on this. (Thank you so much to all of you who have supported this by purchasing an analogue wrist watch for your child. It really is helping them to focus and sharpen their skills). In Year 3 children learn to tell the time on an analogue clock to the nearest minute and read digital times in the 12 and 24 hour clock.

Money – Provide opportunities for your child to experience handling real money. Play shops, including giving change. This will enable children to recognise coins and notes and make the same amount with different combinations. This can then move into solving problems involving money.

Measures – Another great topic to do at home. Involve children in real life measuring activities i.e. cooking tasks, DIY, playing with water in the garden, or bath, so they explore the different units for length, mass and capacity. As children gain a better understanding of measures they will be able to estimate amounts and solve simple problems involving measures.

We were learning about light, how we see and shadows. There are 3 learner guides and 18 class clips on the bbc bitesize website in the Light and dark topic section (click on link below) https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zbssgk7

We had started to look at Naples and Campania. Perhaps you could find out about Mount Vesuvius https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/science/101-videos/0000016f-7d09-dc46-a77f-7fad40050000-11

as well as describing and understanding key aspects of earthquakes. https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/101-videos/00000144-0a2d-d3cb-a96c-7b2d6cd80000

Look into the history of the volcanic eruption at Pompeii. Maybe make a model of an erupting volcano https://www.learning4kids.net/2012/04/11/how-to-make-a-homemade-volcano/ or cook a margherita pizza (this was invented in Naples in the 1880s) https://www.italymagazine.com/featured-story/pizza-margherita-history-and-recipe