We hope that you had a lovely Summer break. Welcome to the Autumn term where we look forward to the continuing partnerships between home and school. As we begin the new academic year, we would like to remind everyone about the importance of attendance. Many of the subjects we teach rely on carefully sequenced and linked lessons and a missed lesson can have a detrimental impact on children’s understanding and ability to ‘keep up’ over the year. If your child will be absent for any reason, please let us know and do speak with your teacher if you have attendance difficulties that you need support with.
Reading
Our goal is to create confident, fluent and independent readers. We prioritise reading at Latchmere School and have very carefully chosen the texts your child will study this term. In Year 3, we focus on word reading to develop fluency and encourage the whole class to join in through strategies such as choral reading (the whole class read together) and echo reading (the teacher models the reading and the class echo back). We also have the Latchmere Reading skills. These are based on comprehension skills such as retrieval, inference, summarising, making links, prediction and vocabulary.
In Year 3, we will be studying When We Lived in Uncle’s Hat, How to Wash a Woolly Mammoth, The Mousehole Cat and The Stone Age Boy.
Maths
Our curriculum is based on the White Rose Maths programme. This research-based initiative ensures that the skills and concepts children taught are fully embedded before moving on. The children are taught strategies such as bar modelling and have plenty of opportunities to use ‘manipulatives’ such as counters and dienes all the way through the school.
This term we will be focusing on addition and subtraction, place value and multiplication and division.
Children should also use the TimesTables Rockstars program to increase their quick recall of multiplication and related division facts.
Curriculum Highlights
This term, we will be learning about life in the Stone Age, Bronze Age and the Iron Age for our history learning. In Science, we will focus on rocks, soils and magnets.
You can find out more information about the Autumn term learning by looking at the overviews and programmes of study on the website.
Home Learning
In Year 3, children will receive a home learning grid at the start of every term. This will include a range of activities to complete. The activities are optional. However, we do encourage the children to complete as many as they can.
Once they have competed an activity we would be delighted for them to bring their finished work into school so that they can share it with the class. The home learning grid for Autumn is attached to this letter.
The children have access to ‘Century’ www.century.tech. Century allows children to independently learn at home. It personalises content, questions and pathways for every learner and identifies gaps in their knowledge. We will provide your child with their log in.
Our first spelling quiz will be on Thursday 18th September and you will receive the spelling homework on 15th September. Spelling lists will go home on a Monday. The spelling quiz will take place on a Thursday.
Please remember to send your child’s reading journal and book to school every day.
Thank you in advance for all of your support,
The Year 3 Team