Our Team
Team Derwent are the Year 3 children in our school. Our class teacher is Miss Leng. 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 start by practising our times tables and our spellings. This is often followed by 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 Monday, Team Derwent will do PE with Mr Hughes so please can PE kits be brought in at the very start of the week. On Thursday afternoon, our team will have Spanish with the amazing Mrs Sadullah followed by Art.
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 each night 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
This year, our spelling curriculum has been updated to a more phonics based approach. We will have daily spelling input in class and a spelling test on a Friday. If your child has struggled with a particular word or sound, you will receive a note in their planner asking for them to practise their spellings one night in the next week – either on Spelling Shed or just with old fashioned paper and pen!
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 is taught by a specialist Spanish teacher, Mrs Sadullah, on a Thursday. In year 3 we focus on 4 skills; listening, speaking, reading and writing. We also build our knowledge of Spanish phonics, vocabulary and grammar. We do this through lots of games, songs, stories, puzzles and creative tasks. 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. We learn how to ask and answer some simple conversation questions, count more confidently to 20 or more and build our colour vocabulary including how to use these adjectives in sentences. We also learn other vocabulary such as fruit, family members and some animals as well as learning about interesting grammar rules like gender and adjective order.
We also have an eTwinning link with a school in Spain and collaborate on various projects and themes together for example sharing Christmas Cards or taking part in a video conference.
Some useful websites:
Topic games: https://wordwall.net/myactivities/folder/951993/year-3
Number games: https://wordwall.net/myactivities/folder/333319/numbers
Colour games: https://wordwall.net/myactivities/folder/333318/colours
Greetings games: https://wordwall.net/myactivities/folder/335220/greetings
