Welcome to Birch class' webpage

I am thrilled to welcome you to Birch class' webpage where you can find all of the information about our class.

Miss Dyball is the class teacher and our Learning Support Assisstants are Mrs Wightman and Mrs Gutteridge.

Spellings

Children are given 10 spellings to practice every week. They will recieve these on a Friday and will be tested the following Friday. It is an expectation that children practice these throughout the week at home, this will support their success in their spelling tests and writing. 

PE

Our PE day is Monday, children must come into school in their PE kits. Please ensure children were appropriate PE clothes, please see our 'Uniform' page under key information for details. All earings must be removed and long hair must be tied up.

Reading

Children are expected to be reading daily, ten minutes each day. If children read a book at home, they can log in to their Accelerate Reader account and take a quiz on their book at home. Children can take a library book home on a Friday, provided they have returned their book from the previous week.

Autumn Term

Talk for Writing

During Autumn Term 1, Birch class explored The Day the Crayons Quit in Talk for Writing, where children wrote an exciting story based on a conflict and resolution plot. During this unit, children developed their writing skills, learning how to use rhetorical questions, varied sentence lengths and a range of conjunctions to communicate how their character is feeling. 

Maths

In Autumn Term 1, the children developed their place value knowledge, introducing hundreds into their knowledge of tens and ones. We explored this with the use of manipulatives and pictoral exmaples of resources. We then moved on to exploring addition and subtraction, introducing and developing our understanding of the formal column method for both addition and subtraction. 

We began by recapping our 2, 5 and 10 times tables before moving onto our 3, 4 and 8s. These are the times tables year 3 children should be secure in by the end of year 3. You can support your child by using timestable rockstars three times a week for ten minutes each. 

Talk for Reading

We use the scheme Talk for Reading for our reading and comprehension. During Autumn Term 1, we start our year by exploring the picture book Window by Jeannie Baker. This book took the children on a journey through a suburb of Sydney, exploring the theme of environmentalism.

Topic

Who were the Greatest Builders?

During Autumn Term 1, the children explored the settlements, clothes, tools and jewlellry of the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age. Children loved discussing how life changed across the ages, how they adapted to their environments and why they changed from being hunter-gatherers to living in farming communities and permenant settlements. We also investigated a range of rocks and their properties, discussing which would make an effective tool. We then moved onto investigating fossils and the process of fossilisation. 

Suggested Reading Books for Year 3