Summer 2

Welcome back! I hope you had a restful and lovely break and ready for our final half term. We’ve got lots of exciting things planned! Keep a look out to see what we’ve been learning about.

Collective Worship

As part of our collective worship time, we like to gather together and listen to Bible Scriptures and discuss their meaning for us. We listen well and respond to God’s word. Reflection also plays a big part in our everyday lives as it lets us think about our choices. We like pray, listen to songs and get active as part of our worship time. We also like to express our gratitude to God for all the special people and things in our lives. Each week we have daily collective worship monitors who are responsible for leading our daily prayers of thanks. They change the collective worship statement and colour of cloth on our collective worship table to reflect the church calendar.

English

This half term, we have continued to read ‘The Boy who grew dragons’ as a stimulus for our guided reading and writing. The children imagined what it would be like to own their own pet dragons. Following this, we wrote lost posters looking for their pet dragons. The children worked in pairs to read a similar WAGOLL poster about a lost unicorn. They identified what made it a WAGOLL poster and found examples of expanded noun phrases, similes and adverbs. Year 3 underlined any unfamiliar words and used iPads to find the meaning of them. They added these worthy words to the English working wall. The children identified which worthy words they would be using the following day in their own lost posters.

Year 3 have been working hard on developing their key core skills in English to punctuate sentences accurately and add detail. We have been using colour coding, to support us with our writing. Each child has their own colour coding strip with velcro prompts so the order can be manipulated to achieve different sentence types. The children loved evaluating my writing first and were able to colour-code the sentences to see what I had missed out. They made suggestions to improve the detail in my sentences first and really enjoyed writing on big paper with colour felt tips to achieve this. We used our class text as a focus for our sentence writing.

Maths

Year 3 have been practising telling the time to o’clock, half past, quarter past and quarter to. When we felt confident with this we practised telling the time in 5 minute intervals and then solved time problems. We ventured outside too to play lots of Burn2Learn games as well.

Following this Year 3 revisited saying the months of the year and how many days are in each month. We discussed how many days are in one year and a leap year. We learnt a song to help us! We added the number of days to our working wall.

Following this, Year 3 continued their maths learning journeys by recognising angles as a property of shape or a description of a turn. We started by recognise angles as a measure of a turn. The children practised making 1/2,1/4,3/4 and whole turns from different starting points in both clockwise and anti-clockwise directions. They listened to and had to follow instructions making these turns. They also had to give instructions using the correct mathematical language, this was very tricky remembering which way was clockwise and anti-clockwise. We added this mathematical vocabulary to our ‘Worthy Word Wall.’ We discussed that an angle is created when 2 straight lines meet at a point. We looked around the school for right angles and discussed whether we could see any that were smaller or greater than a right angle.

Computing

Online Safety

We revisited the key messages about staying safe whilst using the internet. These key messages were that if we are unsure of anything on the internet we should ‘STOP, BLOCK AND TELL!’

Here were the key top tips we learned for staying safe online:

Keep your personal information safe and private (don’t share it with anyone).
People online are not always who they say they are(don’t become friends with someone online that you haven’t met before in real life and never meet up with anyone you speak to online).
Ask before you share– think carefully about the photos you post on the internet. You need to have permission before you post photos of other people online.
Think carefully about the words you use on the internet.
If you see something you feel uncomfortable with, STOP, BLOCK AND TELL!
Always speak to a trusted adult.
Think about your digital footprint– that is what you say and put online stays online.

PE

In PE, the children will be developing their speed, agility and quickness. They will work on their reaction times and how they react to others in relay races. Our focus will be on improving running and jumping techniques as well as our aim and throws. The children have been working hard on improving their aim and throwing skills. We practised improving our ability to react to the defenders.

PSHE

In PSHE we have been discussing growth mindset and fixed mindset. A mindset is a mental attitude that determines how you will interpret and respond to situations.

People with a fixed mindset think that their intelligence is fixed at birth and doesn’t change. They see mistakes as a lack of talent and feel like a failure for having made them.

We discussed some fixed mindset feelings and changed them to a growth mindset.

Here are some phrases that someone might say if they have a fixed mindset:

I’ll always be rubbish at maths.
I’ll never get picked for the netball team, I’m not good enough.
When my science work gets too hard, I give up.
There’s no point trying it because I’ll fail.

A growth mindset is the opposite of a fixed mindset. People with a growth mindset believe that intelligence can be changed and developed throughout their lives.

Here are some phrases that someone might say if they have a growth mindset:

When I make mistakes in maths lessons, I learn from them
Practice makes perfect. Even though I find it tricky, I will keep trying and not give up.
I can’t do this Science work…yet.
I can learn anything that I set my mind to.