Welcome to Team Derwent!
(Year 3)
Our Team
Team Derwent are the Year 3 children in our school. Our class teacher is Mr Hughes and Mrs Kellett is the assistant teacher. We are also very lucky to have specialist teachers for Spanish and Art throughout the week.
What are we learning this year?
We have an exciting year ahead beginning with learning all about our great county in our Mighty Yorkshire curriculum focus; we will learn about the land usage within our county, the produce it yields, the varying landscapes and significant Yorkshire folk. Later on in the year our learning will include early human history from the Stone Age to Iron Age; investigating how forces and magnets work; considering the lasting legacy of the Roman Empire; and exploring light, shadow and reflection.
What does a day in Derwent look like?
Our days typically start with maths challenges followed by a ‘check in’ – a very important part of our day where we can share how we’re feeling. After check in, we dive straight into reading together focusing on fluency and inference. Following this, we continue with our english work in writing – where we will be working hard on sentence structure. After a well deserved break, we then finish our morning with our maths lesson.
In the afternoon, we will practise our beautiful cursive handwriting and often have a second opportunity to read together to focus on developing our comprehension skills. The rest of the afternoon is spent on our creative curriculum, for example, Science, History, Geography, Computing, RE, Art and Design and Technology.
On a Thursday afternoon, our team will have Spanish with Mrs Sadullah and Art with Mrs Brook.
Supporting Learning at Home
Reading
Reading plays such a crucial part in developing an understanding of the world and is one of our favourite things to do in Team Derwent. We ask that everybody in the team reads five times a week and has their planner signed by an adult. One of our teaching team will check planners every morning which will best help with supporting independent reading habits and selecting new books. If your child reads five times in one week, they will receive a stamp and when they have five stamps, they will get to take a special trip to Mrs Fletcher’s treasure box!
Spellings
Spellings will be set every Friday and tested the following Friday. The children will be able to practise their spellings on spellingshed.com or they will also be stuck in their planners or spellings books for the old fashioned style practice!
Maths
Maths in Team Derwent can be quite tricky. This means that it is very important that we continue to practise our basic skills as we move through the year. Numbots helps us a lot with our mental arithmetic:
We will also be working our way up to using TTRockstars to practise times tables: https://ttrockstars.com/
Spanish
Spanish is taught by a specialist Spanish teacher, Mrs Sadullah, on a Thursday. In year 3 Spanish we focus on 5 key skills; listening, speaking, reading, writing and grammar. Children learn how to ask and answer some simple conversation questions, count more confidently to at least 30 and build on their colour vocabulary including how to use them in sentences. We also learn fruit words, days of the week and join in with lots of songs and stories. We learn how to recognise letters and sounds in Spanish and use this to help us learn to read and write simple words and phrases. Children also begin to learn unusual grammar such as the gender of nouns and adjective order.
We also have an eTwinning link with a school in Spain and collaborate on various projects and themes together.
Some useful websites:
https://tinycards.duolingo.com/users/MrsSadullah
https://www.spanish-games.net/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/subjects/zxsvr82
