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 Hand is the assistant teacher. We are also very lucky to have specialist teachers for Spanish, Arts & DT and PE 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 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 our fluency and writing (including perfecting our beautiful cursive handwriting) all before break time! We then finish our morning with our maths lesson.
In the afternoon, we will have a second opportunity to read together to focus on developing our comprehension skills and time to practise our spellings. The rest of the afternoon is spent on our creative curriculum, for example, History, Geography, Computing, RE, Art and Design and Technology.
On a Wednesday morning, our team will have PE with Mr Jeff and Hub time with Miss Knight.
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 allows to 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 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 for the old fashioned style practice!
Maths
Hit the Button is a great place to practise maths basics such as number bonds and doubles and halves: https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button
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 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
