Manor Farm Community Junior School

Year 3 curriculum 2018-19

Autumn Term

English

This term, the children will study Roald Dahl, report writing, instruction writing and shape poems. This will be done through a range of stimuli such as texts and videos. We will be establishing the importance of sentence structure, punctuation and composition and will use this to help us assess their writing.

We have two guided reading sessions planned each week, whereby the children will be studying and comprehending a range of fiction and non-fiction texts, supported by adults.

Maths

This year, we are very excited to be continuing with Inspire maths primarily focussing on Place Value. Will be investigating:

Counting from 0 in 1s, 10s, 100s and 1,000s.
Writing corresponding numbers in words and number words.
Making concrete representations of numbers up to 10,000.
Using a place value chart to show the value of these numbers.
Comparing and arranging numbers up to 10,000 in ascending and descending order.
Addition and subtraction of numbers within 10,000.
Solving 2 step word problems.
Multiplying by 6, 7, 8 and 9.
Multiplication without and with regrouping in ones, tens, hundreds and thousands.

Science

We will be learning to be Rock Detectives where we will study, classify and group types of rocks before investigating their properties through a range of experiments. Later on in the year, we will be learning about Light, in particular shadows and how light travels through different materials.

Computing

We will begin the year by looking at how to stay safe whilst researching on the Internet and we will also be learning how to use the Coding program, ‘Lightbot’.

History

This term we will be focusing on the Stone Age through to the Iron Age. We will be learning about their shelter, the way in which people lived, things they ate and how they communicated. We will even be creating our own cave paintings. There will also be a trip to the Chiltern Open Air Museum to learn more about how people lived during this period.

Geography

We will be developing our locational knowledge of the world using globes, atlases and maps. We will be looking at continents, countries within Europe, capital cities and counties within the UK. We will also be exploring the UK in more detail, looking at physical and human features.

Art and DT

We begin our Art topic with insects where the children will use pencil, oil pastel and watercolour to create different images of insects. We will also be creating shadow puppets, using our knowledge from Science to help us. After half term, we will begin our textiles unit, ‘Puppets’, which will teach them basic sewing skills and will link to our English units.

In indoor PE, we will be learning to dance using ‘Peter Pan’ as a stimulus. This will involve mirroring and we will be introducing basic dance vocabulary and building these into sequences. After half term we will be working on our gymnastic skills and exploring lots of equipment. Our theme will be travelling.

This half term we will start our RE unit of festivals and we will be building towards our Harvest assembly which you are all invited to watch. More details will follow.

Music

After half term, our Music focus will be singing in preparation for our school’s Christmas Production.

PSHE

The children get a weekly PSHE session and we will be focusing on a programme called Friends for Life which develops the children’s resilience, self-esteem and emotional wellbeing. After half term, we will be working on developing healthy minds and positive attitudes when dealing with different situations.

Homework

Every week the children will be given either Maths or English homework. It will be given out on a Thursday and is expected in the following Tuesday. Your child will have a homework slip stuck into their Home School Books and this is also accessible via the school website. Please don’t be daunted by the amount of writing on the weekly homework slip.

This is because we want to help the children to remember exactly what they need to do and to work in partnership with you to give you an idea of what we expect.

On top of this, we also expect children to be learning their times tables (ready for our weekly Cracking Times Table test) and they are expected to read at least 4 times a week and record this in their Home School Books with an adult signature. We take in Home School Books on Monday to check that they are reading a range books and are reading regularly. We would like to encourage children to try reading a range of books by different authors to broaden their vocabulary and fluency in reading. This can include a non-fiction book. Reading regularly has been proved to impact on learning across the whole curriculum.