Did you know that a crying baby can reach the level of 120dB? This week in science we have explore amplitude and have been measuring how loud we can be as well as how loud other everyday objects are. Next week we will explore how scientists and designers create spaces and objects to enhance sound or to use it’s power. Recording studios, microphones and how stadiums are built to maximise the quality of sound.  
In our writing lessons, we will use the settings we have designed this week to write our own quest tale. We will focus on dialogue and commas in lists. The settings the class have created are incredibly imaginative and beautifully detailed. We have floating mountains, deadly mists and glowing stars in pale green skies.  
We will continue to explore multiplication of 2-digit numbers, we have been exploring this over the past week. It really does support the children to know their tables. Using TTRS will support them with quick recall of the facts for them to apply to their new learning.  
Next week is Children’s Mental Health Week. We have PSHE each week in class but today we have been exploring what mental health is and how being connected to those around us is important for our mental health. This connection looks different for each person but it is important that we recognise our connections and support each other.  
The children are enjoying our class novel, The Last Firefox by Lee Newbery. The adventure has only just begun but we can tell it will be one to remember!  
This week’s spellings are: 

• Telescope 
• Television 
• Telegraph 
• Teleport  
• Telephone  

Have a lovely weekend!  

​新年快乐!
This week we have been learning all about Lunar New Year and how it is celebrated in different parts of the world. We have been exploring life in ancient China and how the social class systems were structured. We have made our own lanterns and were gifted a hong bao by one of our classmates.
Next week we will be making a guitar in our science lesson, this will help us really explore how sound waves work and how the vibrations are transferred. Shoeboxes or tissue boxes along with long kitchen roll tubes would be really helpful so that we can all build one!
It is really important that the children are reading 3x a week, the book that is levelled from accelerated reader. It is lovely for me to see in their reading record that they have read other books too!
Spelling lessons next week will focus on the suffix ‘ful’. How many words can you find that have the suffix ful?
The children have worked hard to develop their 3-, 4- and 8-times tables. Times Table Rockstars is really helping those who are accessing it, so please encourage the children to use it if you have the time.
Have a lovely weekend and 新年快乐!

It has been lovely to have the children back at school for the start of the Spring Term! We have had such an exciting time, even in our short week. We have begun our new history unit, The Shang Dynasty, where we have begun to learn about the concept of communication across time. Around the world humans began to write, some chose more life-like images, and some chose symbols to represent objects. In our lesson, we told stories using ancient Chinese characters.  
We have also begun to learn about sound and how the human ear works. We have tested the human ear in multiple ways, finding out how well we can hear through doors and if we are to cover our ears.  
Next week, we will focus on homophones in our spelling lessons. These are words that sound the same but have different meanings. This link may help if you would like to have some fun with homophones at home! What is a homophone? | TheSchoolRun  
I would like to remind everyone that we do recommend and expect the children to read their school levelled book 3 times per week and for a comment to be written by them or a grown up at home. It is important that the children bring their reading books and reading record back to school each day, this way the adults in school can also support them with their reading. If the children choose to read books from home, we ask that this is as well as their school book. The more they read the school books, the more we can assess and support their reading level.  
Have a lovely weekend! ​

The weather has changed as we head into the last week of Term 1 of Year 3! What a busy term we have had! The children have settled into the routines of KS2 and are becoming independent thinkers, creative designers, and thoughtful speakers!  
In English we have begun learning about advertising and how persuasive language can be used to convince people to buy something or to make a choice. We have used hyperbole and rhetorical questions to make the reader think and have thought carefully about our target audience.  
We are now learning about multiplication and division in maths and so it would be great if the children could continue learning their 3, 4 and 8 times tables at home too! 
This link takes you to a site full of fun games that link to all things maths, this page is specifically for multiplication: Times Tables Games (topmarks.co.uk) 
Next week we will enjoy some festive fun with performances of the KS1 nativity and the visit to church. We will continue with adverts and persuasive writing, thinking about how we can share just the right amount of information to interest a reader. We will also be creating our own information leaflet about life in villages, towns, and cities to showcase our leaning from across the unit.  
Have a great weekend!  

We are SCIENTISTS!  
We have been learning about where raw materials come from and how they are used to make synthetic materials. This week we focused on glass and how sand is heated to form a liquid before being shaped into objects we use each day. We have also explored the process of paper being made and how paper is turned from wood to pulp to a sheet of paper we use for drawing, writing, decoration and more! Today, we made our own paper!  
We have been learning about estimation in maths and have focused on rounding to help us with estimation calculations. Next week we will begin our next unit, Multiplication and Division.  It would be great if the children could focus specifically on the 3, 4 and 8-times tables over the next few weeks.  
In Geography we have been designing our own city, thinking carefully about what makes a city as well as where best to place green spaces, residential areas, and factories. We thoughts about transport links and where people would need to go and how best to get there! 
Next week we will be making our own fruit skewers as part of our DT unit, using seasonal fruits to create some tasty treats! We will also be focusing on spellings from the Year 3 Statutory Spellings list we sent home a few weeks ago, we will be looking at different strategies to help us learn these.  

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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