Welcome to Swan’s Class Page! 

Please scroll down for further information about our lovely class and how we learn together!

Thank you,

Miss Mitten

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Standards and Expectations

Moving into Key Stage 2 is a significant step up, the children will have their own locker, allowing them the opportunity to take a greater responsibility for their own belongings. They are expected to have a higher level of independence and take greater responsibility for their learning and are encouraged to be well prepared and organised during lessons. The children will have more responsibility for their learning, choices and behaviour. Building on from the wonderful learning in Year 2, we have high expectations that children become proud of the standard of work they are producing and begin to use cursive handwriting for their writing and produce learning that is presented neatly. All pupils are encouraged to work their very hardest and contribute fully to class life. They are expected to be well behaved, polite and helpful at all times and follow our `Class Rules’. In Year 3, we will continue to build our positive behaviour for learning by remembering to always try our best and have a go at every challenge. 

Curriculum

Please click on the links below to see the topics covered for Core and Foundation subjects, our class timetable and the termly overview. 

Phonics and Spelling

Children in Year 3 who have completed the Little Wandle spelling and phonics programme from year 2, will begin the Year 3 spelling programme using ‘EdShed’. Spellings will be set weekly but a whole term overview will be sent to you so you can see the spellings for the whole term. The children will be set up with logins for EdShed so they have access to games and activities to support their spellings.

Any children who are still accessing the Little Wandle programme will continue to receive phonics lessons and interventions, as well as spellings at their appropriate phonics level.

From Term 2, we will begin weekly spelling quizzes to check the children’s progress with learning their spellings. We will also be practising these spellings through the week at school so we will treat the quizzes as very low key and just part of our normal week to not cause the children any worry.

Reading

Reading is the foundation of your child’s education. As the children did in Key Stage 1, we will spend a great deal of time on reading skills and building a love of reading. We encourage children to read a wide variety of genres and to fully immerse themselves into stories and characters. As well as reading themselves, the children are also given plenty of opportunities to listen to high quality texts, authors and poets to help build on their vocabulary and love of reading.

Children who have completed the Little Wandle scheme of phonics will continue to have reading practice sessions three times a week, using Little Wandle fluency chapter books. These books are designed to expose readers who no longer need phonetically decodable books to high level books that focuses on building and developing reading fluency and comprehension for year 3.

These sessions:

• are taught by a fully trained adult in small groups,
• use books matched to the children’s fluency level using the Little Wandle fluency assessments and book matching guidance. 
• Each reading practice session has a clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory. The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on four key reading skills: vocabulary, prosody (teaching children to read with understanding and expression), a reading skill, eg: how to use tone of voice for different characters speech and comprehension.

Any children still accessing Little Wandle phonics books will continue to do so with a fully trained adult, receiving their three sessions a week until they complete the programme.

Children will also continue to access a wide range of books from our library for reading for pleasure. Fluent readers will also be assessed individually and given a reading range from which to choose their books in order to ensure the material is suitable for their current reading level. This will be reviewed and updated regularly. Children will be allowed to choose their own books, within their reading level, from the class reading corner to read both in school and at home, to an adult. Children are expected to read every day at home and a comment written in their reading record at least three times a week. After they have finished their book, the children will be able to complete a short quiz to assess their understanding of what they have read.

Writing

Writing is taught daily in Year 3 and we teach the children a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. Often, our writing is based on a class story book and we begin our learning by developing our understanding of the book, use of inference, drama and story-telling to over learn the structure of the story. We then apply what we have learnt into adapting the story and creating our own drafts of a story, based on this learning. In Year 3, the children will build on their learning from Year 2 and become more confident at editing and up-levelling a piece of writing by making changes to spelling, grammar and punctuation, or making improvements to what they have written by adding in words and phrases. 

Handwriting

The children will write with a pencil and on the line. We will be building on the cursive lessons already taught in Year 2, using the ‘Letter Join’ handwriting scheme. We expect children by the end of Year 3 to be writing using cursive, legibly and with a consistent size to their letter formation.

Maths

We follow the Power Maths scheme for teaching and learning of maths. This approach focuses on mastery, supported by developing fluency and a deep understanding of the concepts. We encourage mathematical learning with the use of varied resources, concrete and pictorial, to support your child at all levels of their mathematical journey. This makes maths more accessible and fun for all children and helps to convey abstract concepts in a child-friendly way. You can help your child with maths by counting everyday objects regularly, going up to and past 100 and back again. Encourage your child to tell the time with you, add up items on your shopping list and use the correct coins.

Mental arithmetic is an important part of the curriculum. In Year 3, we will have a big focus on building mental arithmetic skills, particularly in multiplication and division, as the children begin to learn more timestables facts. This is to prepare them for the national Timestable check in Year 4. You can support your child with this by using our ‘KIRF’ documents for each term. The KIRF’s, (Key Instant Recall Facts), are designed to support the development of the mental skills that underpin much of the maths work in schools. They are particularly useful when calculating, be it adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing. It would be wonderful if you could support your child with learning their KIRFs.

Homework

Reading

Although your child will be taught to read at school, you can have a huge impact on their reading journey by continuing their practice at home.

Please try to read at least three times a week and record this in the reading record book. Children will be sent home with their reading books on a Friday to share with you throughout the week and brought back in to change the following Thursday. If children reading an AR level book complete their book and bring it in, we will complete an AR quiz with them to test their comprehension of what they have read.

Spelling

From Term 2, the children who have completed the Little Wandle programme for spelling will be moving onto using ‘EdShed’. This is an online platform used in Key Stage 2 to set spellings. The children will be given a login so they can see their spellings, as well as access any of the games and activities on their that supports learning their spellings. We will have a weekly spelling quiz on a Friday to monitor the children’s progress through the spelling curriculum.

Any children still accessing Little Wandle will have weekly spellings too and they will be appropriate to the stage of development they are at.

Other homework now includes a cross-curriculum themed activity sheet with an exciting selection of activities based on different topics we are covering each term. You can find these and the spelling overviews in the links below. We will also send home paper copies of homework each term.

We look forward to working with you this year and thank you for your continued support.

Parents

If you need to speak to the class teacher about any aspect of your child’s schooling, please do not hesitate to contact the office to arrange a telephone appointment or through Dojo.

Class Teacher: Miss L Mitten