Year 3

Year 2 June Newsletter 2024

Literacy

In Writing, students have been learning about Topic Sentences (TS) and Supporting Details (SD). We now know that a topic sentence introduces a paragraph's main idea. It is usually the first sentence of a paragraph. Supporting details follow the topic sentence. Students have been working on identifying topic sentences and supporting details from a collection of sentences. We have also begun to write some supporting details to match topic sentences. Students have been using their knowledge of what we have learnt in health so far, to help us identify and write topic sentences and supporting details. Before we begin each lesson students have continued to review some of our previous topics that we have learnt. We are now excellent at identifying the four different sentence types, noun groups and subjects and verbs within sentences. 

Knowledge

In Knowledge, we have been learning about human senses and movement in our Health unit. We have been using the sport of table tennis to learn how different parts of the body work together to help us move. We began by learning about our sense of hearing, including how it works, parts of the ears and how to protect our hearing. Following on from hearing, we then learnt about our sense of vision, again including how vision works, parts of the eye, such as the pupil and iris, and how to protect our vision. We are now beginning to learn about our muscles, which are soft body tissue that helps us move. Muscles contract and relax to produce motion. There are two types of muscles we are learning about. The first type is voluntary muscles which means to move by choice and examples include the thigh, bicep and shoulder. The second type is involuntary muscles which work automatically and examples include the heart and lungs.

Numeracy

In Numeracy we have extended our knowledge of using the Vertical Algorithm for simple addition and subtraction sums. Students have now been introduced to using the Vertical Algorithm with renaming. This has allowed students to extend themselves to solve more complex problems, by applying their knowledge of place value to support them in reorganising values appropriately.

We have also been learning about Financial Maths. Students have loved learning about the concepts of coins and notes, and especially being able to link and apply their knowledge to experiences in their own lives. Students have enjoyed making different amounts of money by exchanging coins for equal values. 

Students also loved participating in a Chance Experiment, where they were provided with the opportunity to use their own packet of Smarties to answer chance related questions based on their individual set of data. Students used words such as Impossible, Likely, Unlikely, Equal-chance and Certain to help them explain their outcomes. The best part was when students got to eat their Smarties when they had completed their task. Yum!

Social and Emotional Learning

In SEL, we have been learning about Mindfulness and strategies to use when needing some mindful time, such as meditating or mindful colouring. Students discussed that different people will find various ways of practising mindfulness which work better for them. We also discussed the difference between 'mind full' and 'mindful'. Being ‘mind full’ is when your mind is full of thoughts and being ‘mindful’ is being aware of your thoughts. 

We have looked at character strengths and discuss each character strength. We also identified our strongest character strengths and how to spot other’s strongest character strengths. Lastly, we discussed mood changers and identifying strategies which can help us bounce back from negative emotions.