Birkby Junior School

Welcome to Birkby Junior School! We hope you have all had a restful break? We know most of you will be feeling very excited about getting back to learning, especially as none of you have been pupils at our school before. We are so thrilled to properly introduce our new Year 3 children to Birkby Junior School and to get to know you all better.

This half term we will be focussing our learning in English around a range of fictional texts by the author Anthony Browne. We will study many of his books including Into the Forest and The Tunnel. In addition to learning about the texts themselves, we will use them as a basis for writing a range of fiction and non-fiction pieces, as well as exploring drama and reading skills. Following the half term break, we will be writing our very own myths using the well-known Greek myth – Theseus and the Minotaur as inspiration. We will be exploring the language used and the structure of this text to create our own fantastic piece of writing. In addition, we will develop comprehension and reading skills by exploring this language and events in depth! Throughout the school year, 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 this term, we will be looking closely at place value and basic number skills and facts in our lessons to begin with. Later in the term, children will learn our school’s written methods for the four operations and put these into practice through problem solving. We will continue to practice mental recall of key maths facts through weekly tasks. Improving recall of multiplication facts will be a key priority in Maths this year and is vital that children in Year 3 learn these at home as well as in school. There will be an emphasis on learning 3, 4 and 8 times table so please support them as much as possible by encouraging them to use TT Rockstars and other online learning programmes such as Mathletics at home. Your child will receive details on how to access these once they start school.

For our History work this term, we will be learning all about the Stone Age, Iron Age and Bronze Age. This is often a very popular topic as it focuses around early history and compares developments across these ages as well as making links with other periods of History that the children will have learnt about at Infant School.

In Science we will be learning about Plants and Animals during the Autumn Term so all learning with have a Biology focus. In the first half of the Autumn Term our Science work will be targeting Plants, our unit of work will focus around helping pupils to understand the role of different plant parts and also how animals support seed dispersal. Following this, our Animals unit will study food chains, nutrition and the skeletal system.

PE lessons will involve developing the important, fundamental skills needed for sports: stability and locomotor skills. The children will then put this learning to use in our other units of work this term which will be Dance and then Athletics, learning the further knowledge, skills and tactics specific to these.  Please can we ask that children have appropriate PE kit for PE lessons – children must come dressed in this clothing on their PE days, your child’s class teacher will be able let you know which day they have PE on. Our school website and school prospectus contains information about what your child will need to wear for PE.

For more information about all the other areas of the curriculum which we will be learning about in the Autumn Term, please read the curriculum booklet.

The Year 3 team