Class 3A Autumn Newsletter 2015
Dear Parents
Welcome back to a new school year. We hope this information helps you to support your child and give them a positive start to Key Stage 2.
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R.E. topics for this term are:
Homes and families;
Promises in Baptism;
Visitors in our Community
The children will also study Judaism this term.
We held a very special ‘Mission Day’ this term, which gave us all an opportunity to think carefully about our special mission statement: ‘Love, learn and live like Jesus.’ The children enjoyed writing their own bidding prayers and thinking of creative ways of sharing this mission in our school.
Maths- This term there will be a strong focus on number, starting with place value, addition and subtraction. Then moving on to multiplication and division and we are aiming to learn all our times tables up to 12 x 12 by the end of Year 4.
We will continue to look at basic operations, such as understanding + and – operations, ordering numbers to 1000, solving money problems and telling the time to the nearest 5 minutes.
English. We are starting an exciting New Curriculum, and this will include studying a variety of picture books based on authors including Anthony Browne and Shaun Tan. We will also be writing our own ‘tunnel’ story based on ‘The Tunnel by Anthony Browne, and writing a non-fiction report linked to our history work on ‘ The Romans’ and reading class novels by Roald Dahl.
Visiting the library with your child or investigating this topic on your computer will help to support their class work.
Science/DT: This half term we have been looking at ‘Animals and their habitats’ and holding a special science week with the theme of ‘Healthy Lifestyle.’ We are looking at our local environment to find out which animals make their habitats in our school grounds.
Geography: Investigating Our Local Area. The children will be studying Sefton’s physical geography, comparing forest and farm, villages and cities. We will be looking at this in detail next term.
History: ‘ The Romans ’ ; Many of our subjects will link in to this topic, as the children learn about the Roman army, roads, walls and gladiators; designing and making a Roman shield and creating our own mosaics.
P.E. The children will be working on multi-sports on Tuesdays and tennis on Wednesdays.
Also, all classes will have a chance to go swimming this year. Year 3 will be going in the summer term.
Forgetting kit can often be a problem, so please ensure children leave their PE kit in school at all times.
Spelling
The children have been given a Spelling Log Book (orange book) to help them learn their ‘tricky’ spellings at home. The new spellings will be given out on Mondays, and tested the following Monday. We encourage the children to use the ‘look, cover, check’ strategy.
Please encourage the children to return to previous spellings so they can spell them easily, and initial next to the word when the children can do this.
Reading
We are focussing on reading this term, and several mum helpers have offered to read with the children during some mornings. If you have an hour or so to spare, we would love to hear our children read regularly. We have also began ‘buddy reading’ with Class 5/6/ Mc on Fridays, which is proving to be very successful.
Please listen to the children read every night (if possible) and the children can change their books every Friday. When the children are reading, ask them to predict what they think is going to happen; ask them questions about the plot of the story, questions about characters or how the story might end.
Homework
This will be set every week, usually given out on the Monday, to be handed in on the Friday. The children will be expected to read every night, and one piece of literacy and numeracy homework will be set every week. On some occasions, the children will be set homework related to RE, history or science topics.
Don’t forget the Inset Day coming up: Friday 23rd October.
Thanks again for your continued support.
Mrs Ashcroft (Class 3A )
