Monksmead School

Respect, Reflect, Believe, Succeed

Welcome to Year 3

 

Teacher: Mrs Moynihan

TAs: Mrs Waller and Mrs Kumar

Spring Term in Year 3 

 

Happy New Year to all of our wonderful Year 3 families. I cannot believe that we are now in 2024!  I hope you all had a restful break over Christmas and are raring to go.

 

We’ve got lots of exciting things to look forward to in the year ahead. 

 

English

In English we will carry on following a book-based curriculum and will be looking at traditional tales, report writing and explanation texts. I will continue to review the phonics taught in Key Stage 1, but with a focus on spelling. Plus, the children will have an extra spelling lesson once a week, taught by Mrs Phillips, looking at common spelling patterns, suffixes and prefixes.  We will also have whole class guided reading sessions twice a week, focussing on the key areas children need to know and understand, in order to improve their comprehension of texts.

 

Maths & Science

In Maths, we will continue the Herts for Learning curriculum, starting off with subtraction and moving on to multiplication and division, factors and fractions. In Science this half-term, we will be investigating forces, including magnetism. After half-term our topic will be electricity.

 

PSHE

In PSHE this term we will be learning all about families and friendships. We will learn to recognise and respect that there are different types of families and that being part of a family provides support, stability and love.  We will move on to learn about media literacy and digital resilience, discussing the many uses of the internet, but also learning strategies of how to spot what is accurate and true and how to search safely. We will also delve into the area of money and work. The children will learn about the terms income, saving and spending and start to think about skills that they may need in their future work life.

 

PE

PE lessons will still take place every Wednesday morning and Friday afternoon. This term, we will be swimming on Wednesdays, so please make you’re your child arrives with their costumes and towels.  For our tag rugby lessons on a Friday, they will need appropriate PE kit for both indoor and outdoor PE.

 

Reading

Children will continue to read with an adult on their designated reading day. Please make sure that the children have their reading books in school every day, as there may be opportunities for extra reading with an adult as and when. In addition, guided reading is taught on a whole-class basis, twice a week, following the Vipers scheme. Buddy reading will take place every Wednesday morning and children are welcome to bring a book in from home to share with their Year 6 reading buddy.

 

Homework

Homework will be handed out every Wednesday and expected back in Monday morning.  Homework is meant to practise skills that have been previously learned in class and shouldn’t be a source of stress or anxiety.  Children also have access to Mathletics and TT Rockstars, should they want to challenge themselves further.

 

Thank you for your support. It really is a privilege to spend each day teaching your children. If you require any further information, please do not hesitate to speak to me after school, through email or via the class dojo app. 

 

Many Thanks,

 

Natasha Moynihan

Year 3 Spring Timetable 2024

Reading in KS2

In KS2 children have daily whole-class reading lessons.  At Monksmead, we use VIPERS from Literacy Shed Comprehension Plus to help structure the learning and ensure that all key skills are being learnt.    

VIPERS is an acronym to aid the recall of the 6 reading domains as part of the UK’s reading curriculum.  They are the key areas which we feel children need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of texts.  The 6 domains focus on the comprehension aspect of reading and not the mechanics: decoding, fluency, prosody etc.  As such, VIPERS is not a reading scheme but rather a method of ensuring that teachers ask, and students are familiar with, a range of questions.  They allow the teacher to track the type of questions asked and the children’s responses to these which allows for targeted questioning afterwards.

 

To support the children in accurately answering comprehension questions, we use A.P.E.   This stands for 'Answer', ' Prove it' and 'Explain it'.

Science Knowledge Organisers  - Spring 2024

 

Click on the images below to enlarge the knowledge organiser for the individual topic area.