Well, another week has gone by in Year 3 and here we are again. We have had a great week this week fully settling into our new routines and getting used to the “strange” new adults in the year group (don’t tell Mr Witcomb I called him strange).

This week in literacy, we have continued our work on the book ‘Ten-Word Tiny Tales’. We had a go at writing our own tales late last week, a task that is harder than it sounds! Have a go yourself! Trying to tell a story of a picture in only 10 words is a challenge for any author! We are now extending our tiny tales to make some longer narrative pieces. The challenge now is to write, based on one of the wonderful pictures in the book, for a solid 5 minutes. I can’t wait for the results!

I hope that you all found the Spelling Shed homework this week, we continued looking at those spellings at the end of last week and extended the task to looking at some prefixes and suffixes for words such as ‘found’. In the next few days (and for the homework) we will look at words that have the same spelling (‘ou’) but make a /u/ sound (enough, cousin, rough etc etc). Guided reading has also continued this week with lots of retrieval practice (of words, not sticks, don’t worry…).

In maths, at the end of last week, we began a unit on length and perimeter. We proved to be experts in measuring the length of various things using a ruler, though the estimation beforehand was a bit trickier! Nonetheless, as rulers of our own destiny, we measured brilliantly! Next, we will be looking at measuring the perimeter of shapes by measuring their outside. Mr Witcomb has been spending some more time on number and place-value, moving into representing numbers with 4 digits, 1, 10 or 100 more or less and concepts such as ‘greater than’ and ‘less than’. More practice with our times tables is always a good thing to do as well. We all know what the best maths tool in the box is… Yes that’s right, multi-pliers…

During topic lessons we are looking at layers of the rainforest and exploring the diverse wildlife that lives in each part. In science, not to leaf anything out, the topic on plants has really taken root. We have looked at how plants absorb water from the soil and at the different parts of a plant.

On that note, time to end. Have a great week everyone!

Mr Coates and Mr Witcomb.