Birkby Junior School

Welcome Back Year 3! We hope you had a restful break and are looking forward to a Spring Term of exciting learning now that you have settled into life at Birkby Junior School.

This term the focus of our Geography and History lessons will be exploring our Local area. Year 3 will have the opportunity to learn about what makes the local area of Birkby and Huddersfield special by learning all about the textile industry and what made it so successful back in the 19^th century. The children will go out on a local walk trip to investigate Huddersfield and Birkby in more detail to further develop their understanding of the history and geography of their surrounding area.  We will compare the features of our urban environment with the rural village of Marsden a few miles away and study geographical features of these areas such as rivers, canal and architecture.

To help our children to make links with the knowledge gained in History some of our Art work will explore the work of DS Lowry who was famous for depicting scenes from the Industrial Revolution. The development of important painting skills will be at the centre of this unit of work as Year 3 will practise mixing colours to create art work in the style of DS Lowry. Through our unit of work on Yayoi Kasama, will study the importance of colour and repeating patterns in art; using what we have learnt to develop our skills in collaging and use of colour.

This half term we will be focussing our learning in English around another new text for Year 3: Stone Age Boy by Satoshi Kitamura which is a fiction story about a friendship between a boy from the modern world who travels back in time, into the Stone Age where he meets a girl who belongs to a Stone Age tribe. We will use this text as a basis for writing a range of fiction and non-fiction pieces, as well as exploring drama and reading skills. This book will also help reinforce our History learning from the Autumn Term as we learnt all about Prehistoric life. Following the half term break, we will then introduce some further new texts: Big Blue Whale by Nicola Davies and This Morning I Met a Whale by Michael Morpurgo, these texts will help the children to write for different purposes e.g. a non chronological report; an information text and a persuasive article.  In addition, we will develop comprehension and reading skills with all the texts during the Spring Term and there will be daily reading sessions in class and opportunities to read 1:1 with adults. These will focus on developing fluency in reading and retrieval of facts from the text to begin with; providing these regular opportunities to read is very important and we would love it if you also took time to read frequently at home.  Please remember to read as much at home with your child as every pupil in school will bring home their ‘home reading books’ to share. Please try to find time to read as often as possible: any opportunity to share and discuss books will help your child to become a better reader and develop their love of reading. Even if your child is a confident reader, finding time to read at home will strengthen important comprehension skills such as prediction, summarising and inference and broaden their vocabulary and understanding of language used by authors. For some children in Year 3, decoding skills still need to be practised at home. If so, they will bring home a decodable book to help them practice the sounds they have been taught in phonics lessons. Don’t worry if they also bring home another book for sharing, this is a book you can read and enjoy with people at home – lets work together to develop good attitudes towards reading!

In Maths, the children will revisit multiplication and division skills to ensure they have mastered the written skills needed in preparation for complex problem solving. We will be exploring measurements, in particular length and perimeter, before finishing the term, with a focus on fractions. Later in the term we will move onto other measurements such as mass and capacity. In all lessons your child will have the opportunity to improve their fluency and reasoning skills. There will also be continued emphasis on improving recall of multiplication facts and learning the 4 and 8 times tables so make sure you practice at home as these fact underpin a lot of mathematical concepts and learning e.g. fractions! Every day we will continue to work on our Fluent in Five tasks to further improve fluency skills in Maths and we also hope you carry on using Mathletics and TT Rockstars at home as a fun way to improve your mental maths skills.

Our Science learning in the first half of the Spring Term will be rocks and soils. This is usually a very popular chemistry unit in Year 3 so we are looking forward to teaching them all about different types of rocks, how they are created and how these link to soils. Physics will be the focus of science learning in the second half of the term as we will learn all about Forces. Lessons will develop pupils’ knowledge of different types of force and help them to understand whether they are pushing or pulling forces. Investigative work will give the children the opportunity to explore certain forces such as Friction. 

PE lessons will involve learning manipulative fundamental skills (such as catching, dribbling, passing); gymnastics; yoga and Games so make sure your child comes to school in the correct PE kit on their PE days – we will send text messages to remind you which day each class has PE. Striking and fielding will be the focus of our ‘Games’ lessons; we will be learning skills specific to games which involve striking and fielding e.g. games which involve striking balls with our hands, feet and equipment such as bats. We will encourage Year 3 to draw upon skills they developed in earlier units of work e.g. team games so that they can refine and improve their skills. In our gymnastics unit we will practise skills such as balancing, turning and landing when putting together sequences of movements and in our Yoga lessons we will learn Yoga positions to help build strength, balance and flexibility.

What a busy and exciting term we have in store! Please have a look at our Spring Term curriculum booklet for more information about what we will be learning this term.

The Year 3 Team