Hello, and welcome to another weekly Year 3 update. From a pretty odd beginning (with the burst water main) to the freezing cold temperatures we’ve had to endure, it feels like it’s just been one of those weeks! Your children have rolled with the punches admirably.

We’ve been up to the following this week:

• In literacy, we’ve started to look at a Christmas and winter-themed poem called Coming Home, written by Michael Morpurgo. We’ll be continuing to work on that next week, building towards writing instructions about making a bird feeder ball, using bananas, oats and a pine cone.
• In maths, we’re now in the middle of learning column addition and subtraction. Please refer to our Maths Made Clear videos if you’d like help to support your child at home with this topic.
• In geography, we learned about some of the different counties of the UK. Next week, we’ll be focusing on the hills and mountains of the UK.
• In Design and Technology, we started making our Christmas stockings ahead of next week’s Christmas fair. We’ll be working hard next week to get them ready for our Christmas display hoop!
• In computing, we continued to be Scratch bug hunters. This week, we attempted to figure out how to program a Knock Knock joke to make it work correctly.

Rabbi Zvi

On Thursday morning, we were lucky enough to be visited by Rabbi Zvi from a synagogue in Reading. He spent time with the class explaining the origins of Judaism, telling some of the faith’s most important stories and explaining Jewish rituals (such as the Shabbat and the Seder Plate at Passover). Look out for some photos on our social media pages soon.

TTRS and Spelling Shed

You should have received an email on Thursday explaining that TTRS homework is slightly different this week. Each child is being asked to complete a ‘Gig’ – a five-minute game designed to help set the correct level of times table questions. As a result, please try to resist giving your child much help with the answers as it will skew the results.

PE and swimming

As well as PE for everyone on Monday, this Tuesday afternoon it is Mr. Burrows’s class’s turn to go swimming. Miss Lunnon’s class should come to school in PE kit that day.

Supporting the school on social media

As you may or may not have realised, the school has recently started making a real push with marketing itself on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X by making them places to help you keep up with all the fun and exciting things the school is up to. In order to spread the word, we would really appreciate it if you could, a) follow us on these platforms if you don’t already, and b) like and share our posts.

We hope you manage to stay warm and day this weekend, and we will see your child bright and early on Monday morning.

The Year 3 team