Year 3

In year 3, as we welcome the children into our school in the autumn term, we straight away begin learning all about the TAB Way and the school values of Community Spirit, Showing Respect, Being Responsible and Embracing Challenge.

Our first exciting topic in the autumn term is ‘Timeless Tales’ for reading and writing. The children enjoy being immersed in many traditional tales from around the world such as fairy tales, Baba Yaga and The Twits (Roald Dahl). Our geography theme is based around volcanoes, which culminates in a creative ‘Arts Week’ where the children build their own erupting volcano, as well as designing and creating a volcano collage.

During the spring term, the ‘Ancient Footsteps’ topic is driven by learning about the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age eras. We immerse the children into this topic through role-play and hands-on activities, such as using fires to cook and making tools in our Forest School environment. There will be numerous opportunities for the children to compare life as it changed for communities during these prehistoric times; how communities worked together and what happened if they did not. We will also use key non-fiction and fiction texts to guide our reading and writing skills throughout the term. A highlight for the children is to write their own story and produce a book based upon ‘Stone Age Boy’ (Satoshi Kitamura).

In the summer term, the year 3 spy school topic is when the children become ‘spies’ as they develop and use their detective skills to piece together information and clues about our local area of Tarring and other places in West Sussex, and how they have changed and developed over time in a geographical and historical sense. We will use local maps and photographs and other historical documents to understand more about the local area and develop independent enquiry skills.

Throughout the year, year 3 children will be involved in sequences of Forest School activities, where the outdoor learning environment will stimulate the children. Forest School activities increase self-belief, enthusiasm, communication and problem solving skills.

The creative curriculum in year 3 is designed to enable the children to enjoy a range of collaborative and discursive learning opportunities in order to help them develop an understanding of themselves as more independent and resilient learners. Many of our subjects have been linked to the main topic being studied, allowing the children to make purposeful links in their learning. In year 3 we focus on the development of oracy and the use of the talk phrases linked to the TAB Way and have a great emphasis on the love of reading, as it is very important to help build the children’s reading stamina and experiences.

Year 3 is an exciting and busy year, which holds many opportunities for the children to thrive in a rich and diverse curriculum, and have access to a wealth of resources that will enable deep learning and extremely rewarding experiences.

The Year 3 Team