Welcome to Year 3!

Dear parents, carers and children,

Welcome to Year 3's Class Page! Here you will be able to find out about the learning we are enjoying in school, as well as keeping up to date with important information about the class. The children have made an excellent start to life in Key Stage 2 and we are already so proud of how well they are adapting to the daily routines. Thank you for your support at home - if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact the school office (admin@olol.org.uk) and we will get back to you as soon as we can!

Kind regards,

Mr Hall

Please find the slides used from our Parent Presentation above. 

Important information

PE will be taught on Wednesdays and Fridays. Please ensure that the children are in PE uniform - it would be preferable for children not to wear earrings on PE days, however if this is not possible they should be covered in micropore tape. Please also ensure that long hair is tied back.

Children have now been set up on our new reading scheme. Thank you for your support in helping your child to read daily at home - please help us by sending the children in with their reading records and reading books, each day, so we can continue to read with the children regularly.

School Calendar

Please follow the link for all the events happening in school

Term 5

The Finger Eater by Dick King-Smith

'The Finger Eater' is a funny yet thoughtful tale about Ulf The Finger Eater who prays on poor people's fingers. When unsuspecting walkers pass his hole, Ulf pops out and offer his hand, with a broad smile on his frog-face, and asks people "How do you do?" However, when people offer their hand in return, Ulf bites off their index finger with his razor sharp teeth. This story is a tale designed to immerse the children in to a fantasy world with unique characters where they can work on their language and sentence level skills and well as developing the understanding of characters and narrative.

Potty about Plants!

In science this week, we have been looking at the parts of a plant and investigating their individual functions. We learnt that a root anchors the plant to the ground and absorbs nutrients from the soil. We learnt that the stem keeps a plants upright and transports the nutrients around the plant. We also learnt that the leaves use sunlight to create food for the plant using a process called photosynthesis as well as that flowers are to attract insect for reproduction. 

Watch out for Ulf - The Finger Eater!

We got in to character and immersed ourselves in 'The Finger Eater' using drama. After reading the text, we thought about how the characters would've felt and what that would look like if we were really there. We then got ourselves into role and performed our drama to the rest of the class. We really enjoyed getting into character and felt s though we were really there.

Term 3

As part of our immersion into our new focus text in English, 'Hortense and the Shadow', we dramatised our favourite moments from the story with a partner, and then guessed which part others were acting out. Already, we have written a set of instructions for how to escape a shadow, and next we will be focusing on retelling parts of the narrative using speech punctuation.

Term 2

This term, our focus text is 'Iron Man' by Ted Hughes. We are learning our story map to help us remember the resolution of the story and how the Iron Man defeats the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon. This will lead into our own, independent retelling of the battle. Later in the term, we will use the text to support us with writing instructions, as we develop our non-fiction skills.

RE

In RE, we have been exploring the qualities of a Saint. We have learnt about Blessed Carlo Acutis, who is on his way to Sainthood having been beatified in 2020. Carlo was only 15 when he died and will become the first millennial Saint.

Having learned about his life, we used our knowledge, along with previous learning to try and answer the big question 'Can I be a Saint today?' giving reasons for our answers.

As we move into Advent, we will be learning that for Christians, Advent is a time to journey closer to God. Through the stimulus of book, film and song, we will be linking together different journeys from stories that we will use to help us understand the most important way we can prepare for Christmas.

UWE Trip

We had a great time exploring the University of the West of England's engineering department, as part of STEM week enrichment. We took part in a Minecraft engineering workshop, where we were able to explore Bristol, in the world of minecraft and make any changes or additions that we liked. There were some fantastic ideas including; a glass tunnel underneath the harbour, so tourist could experience the harbour from a different perspective; an animal shelter, next to Temple Meads train station and even a diving board off the Clifton Suspension Bridge!

The afternoon session consisted of a tour around the engineering department and an opportunity to meet real life engineers. We saw a race car that the UWE students built themselves and race all over the world; a virtual reality room, where we were able to discover a virtual world and even a working robot that makes things that have been ordered on the internet!

The children were a credit to the school and themselves, they had a wonderful time and we have many tired children at the end of it.

Archery

Sports enrichment took us to the discipline of such heroes as Robin Hood or Hawkeye - that's right, archery! We developed our hand eye coordination, balance and aiming skills in order to improve our ability to hit the targets with the arrows. We very much enjoyed the experience and there were a lot of very proud children about the improvement in their scores, by the end of the session.

Bonjour français

Our modern foreign languages focus for this term took us to France. We explored french greetings, counting to ten (via a classic game of 'What's the time Mr Wolf') and names of food. We especially enjoyed the different words for everyday food and we even showed off our conversation skills in celebration assembly. Oh, and the day was finished off with the best of French cuisine - crêpe au chocolat!

Boxercise

We channelled our inner Anthony Joshua during our sports enrichment activity. We were supported by progressive sports to develop our balance and coordination skills through boxercise.

Term 1

Following our opening unit of work in English of writing autobiographies, we have now started our next unit based around the text 'Wolves in the Walls' by Neil Gaiman. We will magpie new vocabulary and narrative techniques before writing our own opening for the story, with our own characters. See if your child can retell the opening of the original story, just by looking at the picture map below!

On the final week of term, we held a hugely successful cake sale! Inspired by our learning in Geography about climate change and how deforestation can contribute to the warming of the world, we wanted to be AGENTS OF CHANGE and help make a difference to families affected by this.

By raising an incredible £86.40, we have helped to do the following for families living in the Amazon Rainforest:

*Forest School! Provide a year of mentoring to grow fruit and vegetables and raise free range chickens to eat and sell, while also helping the rainforest to recover and flourish!

*Help them to plant and maintain their very own vegetable garden!

*Provide essential training for a farmer to maintain weatherproof crops!

*Pay for essential tools such as hoes, sickles and hammers, as well as training, to enable indigenous fire brigades to manage the land they live on, preventing fires from starting or spreading!

*Supply a family with five fruit tree saplings, as well the tools and training needed to produce their own tree nursery!

THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR SUPPORT WITH MAKING AND BRINGING IN CAKES TO SUPPORT US WITH OUR MISSION! THIS WAS AN EXCEPTIONAL OUTCOME!

Science

In science this term, we have been exploring how our skeletons and muscles make us who we are. We have been grouping and classifying animals based on their skeletal system and liking our understanding to how we classify our human skeletal system.

We then investigated the role muscles play in our body. We created bionic hands to show how the skeleton, muscles and tendons all work together to help us move.

Digi Wall

We had great fun enjoying the Digi Wall experience. Mike and Dan showed us how to play different games that would showcase our reaction times and climbing skills. We were also able to show great resilience and togetherness that showed what we are able to achieve when we work as a team.