Spring 1 Term

Year 3 have had a very busy start to 2025 and continue to work hard.

We have recently been seeing huge improvements in the quality of the children’s writing and they have been thinking carefully about their writing while exploring the text ‘Escape from Pompeii,’ by Christina Balit. They found out about the famous volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius, before writing a letter from the characters from the story as they escaped the doomed city of Pompeii. Within guided reading, we have been enjoying reading various books about the Ancient Romans. The children have spent time developing their reading fluency and been practising retrieving information from the text using skimming and scanning.

Within maths, we started off the year by learning how to tell the time to the nearest minute using analogue clocks. We have since moved on to re-cap our place value knowledge on numbers up to 3-digits. Furthermore, we have practised measuring units of length (in millimetres, centimetres and metres) and mass (in grams and kilograms) before applying our understanding of this to problems involving the addition and subtraction of measurements.

This month we have started a new history topic that we are all enjoying, based on the ancient Romans. We are working towards finding out why the Romans chose to invade and settle in Britain. So far, we have found out what it was like to live in ancient Rome, the significance of the Roman Empire and how the Celts responded to Roman invasion.

Within science this half term we are focussing on the scientific discipline of chemistry, and within our topic are exploring solids, liquids and gases. The children have explored the properties of different materials and determined whether they are a solid, liquid of gas. Additionally, they have carried out an experiment, studying the viscosity of different liquids.

In art we have been examining abstract sculptures and have practised creating 3D structures using 2D shapes. While doing this, we explored how we could join our shapes using folds, tabs and slits. We will be using a lot of card during this unit so please feel free to carry on donating thin cardboard boxes such as cereal boxes over the coming weeks.

We have also been developing our understanding of the French language; learning how to count to 10 and the names of common colours. We are now learning the names of different musical instruments.

Finally, for our PE lessons we have been exploring movements that relate to the theme of machines and have watched videos of gears, levers and pulleys to help inspire these. The children have started choreographing their own routine and will look to add to this over the coming weeks. We have also been learning the skills of dribbling and passing in hockey.

So much already covered and a lot more to go! We look forward to sharing with you all of the children’s hard work in the future.