Literacy

For literacy this half term, students have started to practise their first reading skill, prediction. The children have discussed the importance of being able to make appropriate predictions and have talked about how a blurb or an image can help to make a sensible guess about what will happen in a story. The children have engaged very well with this and their enjoyment is reflected in the predictions they have made and their thoughts and ideas about the characters.

 

In addition to making predictions, the children in year 3 have also completed a non-chronological report, which talks about school meals at Curwen. This was their first formal piece of writing since moving up to year 3 and though it was a challenge, the children all strove for success and completed something they can be proud of.

Can I partition numbers using concrete resources? 

In Year 3, there is a big push to make Maths accessible to all. Some people learn best by doing.  In fact, it is said that all children benefit from learning by doing.  Some parents have admitted, that they have even used kidney beans to explain addition and subtraction.

So far, we have worked on the Properties of Numbers, and have used the Dienes to represent hundreds, tens and units/ones.  The children were effectively able to find the answers to their Maths questions, and feel an overall sense of achievement.

 

In topic, we have been learning about our local area.  So far, we have learnt that Plaistow, our local area, is a town, which is within the borough of Newham. We also learnt that the smallest human settlement is called a hamlet and that counties are bigger than cities but smaller than a country. To help us understand place the settlements in the correct order, we created settlement hierarchy circles. We have also looked at 4-ficure grid references to help us locate place on a map.