We have had the most wonderful week full of new learning and developing our understanding of concepts. 
In English, we have been writing our own version of Journey, written by Aaron Becker. We have used fronted adverbials to structure interesting sentences that engage the reader as well as similes to help the reader visualise the story. Next week we will publish our story and make a small book with our own illustrations. 

In maths this week we have worked hard to exchange across columns with 3-digit numbers when adding and subtracting. We will continue this next week but dive deeper into the reasoning and problem-solving phase of learning.

Today we explored the woodland school and used natural materials to make maps of the area. This was great fun and enabled us to work on our team building skills. 

We will be learning about apostrophes and contractions in spelling next week, focusing on why they are used and when to use them. Using this link may help you support your child if you have the time. Year 3 Apostrophes for Contractions - Parent Guidance (free-secret-resources.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com) 

Have a lovely weekend! 

It was really interesting that not too long ago we were learning about the population of earth; we even discussed that we were so close to a population of 8 billion. This week, the population of earth reached 8 billion! That is a huge number! This was really interesting for us to notice as part of our current Geography unit. 

In Science, we have been exploring materials. Raw materials come from nature and are untouched in terms of change. Next week we are exploring synthetic materials and it would be great if the children could bring in some examples of raw or synthetic materials to help us with our lesson on sorting and identifying characteristics. 

Oak class have worked hard to use fronted adverbials, similes and coordinating conjunctions in their writing this week and next week, we will continue to work on putting all of these new skills together to write about The Journey. 

Today we were treated to the most incredible performance by Theatre Alibi. The show was clever and interesting which sparked lots of exciting questions in class. We decided to design our own boxes and thought carefully about what we would need and how we could store it in such a small place. 

In spelling, we are continuing to work on prefixes and suffixes. The suffixes we have explored are 's', 'es', 'er', 'ed' and 'ing'. The prefixes that we are exploring are 'un', 'in' and 'dis'. We have used these to explore tenses, plurals and changing the meaning of a root word to the opposite. 

Here are some links that may be useful to check out! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBdIzj0elzI - Synthetic fibres. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH4cMjyBZWg - prefixes

It has been a busy week in Year 3! We have explored lots of new methods in our maths lessons as well as new vocabulary to help us identify the difference between addition and subtraction. We know that addition is commutative, and subtraction is not! Using counters we found ways to exchanges when adding across 10s and 1s! We have also explored similes and fronted adverbials in our English lessons, exploring retelling a story with some exciting sentences. 

We also identified what the differences between villages, towns and cities were and thought about where we live in comparison to these. 
Next week we will continue exploring these but by looking at what affects where people choose to live. For this, it would be really interesting if we have any families that have lived elsewhere and if you could talk about the different places you have lived in comparison to where you are now. I know that living in China is very different to living in Devon in many different ways for me! 

Cities, towns and villages - BBC Teach 
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Today, we were incredibly lucky to enjoy our woodland school. We explored building a shelter, how to safely light a fire and were able to test the shelters to see how wet we may get if a storm were to arrive! Take a look at our shelters! 

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Just like that, the first week back after the holiday is over! 

We have had a busy week starting some new and exciting units! In Geography we looked at populations of different countries and watched the count of the population of the world... live! We have been exploring using concrete resources in maths to support us with our pictorial and abstract representations. Working as a team to work through addition and subtraction equations of 3-digit numbers! 

Our focus in English has been vocabulary, we have been learning about similes, can you make some fun similes at home? We were also lucky to have a tag rugby session this afternoon, it was great to see Year 3 having fun and working as a team! 

Next week in science, we will be exploring our new unit - Raw Materials. It would be great if the children collected some objects from home made from different materials (plastics, cotton, metal, wood and so on). One or two per child is more than enough for us to share and sort as a class. 

This half-term, we have started sharing books that we would like our friends to read. Each week a child takes their turn to choose some books for our display. These can come from home or school and are placed for others to read and share. This has really helped encourage a love of reading this week, we will go through the class in register order to help make sure everyone gets to share! 

Here is a link to some information on similes that may help with some simile fun at home! Similes interactive - Teaching resources (wordwall.net) 

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