Year 3 - Middle Unit
Over the past few weeks, Year 3 students have been learning lots in Reading! We began the term by working on our questioning skills, using lots of interesting mentor texts about famous scientists. We learned about thick and thin questions and how these can help us to understand and think about what we are reading.
We have also been looking at different text features (such as a contents page, captions, glossaries etc) and how they help us search for information.
We are currently working on our synthesizing skills, practising identifying new information we have read in a text and examining new vocabulary. We are also comparing the information we previously had, to what we have learned.
In Writing this term, each student has chosen a famous scientist to research and write an information report about. Some examples are Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Jane Goodall, Nikola Tesla and Alan Turing (to name a few!). We began by researching our scientists and writing down notes about their lives and achievements. We then began to write our reports, starting with a lead and then launching into our body paragraphs. The Year 3 teachers have loved seeing the enthusiasm students have displayed during our writing sessions, and are looking forward to reading the finished information reports in a week or so!
In Maths, we have begun our unit on multiplication. Each student has been given an individual counting goal and it has been fantastic to see the hard work going into practising these goals both at school and at home!
We have been learning about different strategies to help us solve multiplication problems, starting with 'groups of' and 'arrays' and moving through into ‘splitting and sticking’ numbers to help us work through each task.
We were very excited to see so many of our lovely Year 3 families join us for Family Maths Night last night. Thank you to those who took time out of your Wednesday evening to join us - we hope you all left with lots of fun ideas and ways to practise maths at home!
In line with our work on famous scientists and their achievements, the Year 3 students have donned their imaginary lab coats and have been learning about chemical changes in Science! We began the unit by performing 3 different experiments, with each of the Year 3 teachers. This was a highlight for many of our students!
Since then, we have looked at both liquids and solids - learning about how their molecules are arranged, listing some examples of each and defining what makes materials fit into each category. Over the coming weeks we will be launching into learning about different elements and their properties!
Finally, as a special treat, the Year 3 students were invited into the Carlsruhe classrooms to learn about the Sustainability projects completed by the Year 4s at the end of Term 2. Each Year 4 student had their work on display and presented it to their Year 3 peers. We were very impressed with the amount of information they had discovered and impressed with how it was presented. Well done Year 4s!
Year 3 Teachers
Ashleigh Dodds (3AD), Mark Condon (3MC), Sally Quinn (3SQ)