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.
Mrs McLaughlin is the class teacher and our Learning Support Assisstant is Mrs Reid.
Spellings
Children are given 10 spellings to practice every week. These will be posted on ClassDoJo 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 Wednesday, 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.
In Autumn 2, we explore persuasive writing in the form of an advert. The children had the opportunity to design their own product to write a persuasive advert about. During this unit, children developed their use of persuasive language, including strong and emotive adjectives, imperative verbs and rhetorical questions.
Maths
In Autumn Term 1, the children will develop their place value knowledge, introducing hundreds into their knowledge of tens and ones. We will explore this with the use of manipulatives and pictoral exmaples of resources. We will then move on to exploring addition and subtraction, introducing and developing our understanding of the formal column method for both addition and subtraction.
In Autumn 2, the children will complete their addition and subtraction unit, solidifying their understanding of formal methods. We then moved onto multiplication and division. During this unit, children will develop their understanding of the 3, 4 and 8 timestables as well as grouping and sharing.
We will begin 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 will 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.
In Autumn 2, we will read Charlotte's Web, focusing on understanding the different characters and how different language choices can impact how a character is portrayed. We will also start to retrieve evidence from the text to support out ideas and inferences.
Topic
Who were the Greatest Builders?
During Autumn Term 1, the children will explore the settlements, clothes, tools and jewlellry of the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age. Children will love 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 will also investigate a range of rocks and their properties, discussing which would make an effective tool. We will then move onto investigating fossils and the process of fossilisation.
In Autumn 2, we will develope our knowledge of fossils and move onto exploring what soil is made from and how it is formed. In geography, we will explore the countries and cities which make up the United Kingdom, identifies human and physical features on a map. We will also draw on our own land use maps and learn how to use keys to show the features of an area on a map.
