Year 3

Welcome to Year 3

Your children's Teachers are:

English

In  year 3, pupils should be able to read books written at an age appropriate interest level and focus on understanding what they read rather than on decoding individual words.  We focus on developing their vocabulary and the breadth and depth of their reading, making sure that they become independent, fluent and enthusiastic readers who read widely and frequently. We develop their knowledge and skills in reading non-fiction about a wide range of subjects. They learn to justify their views about what they have read with support at the start of year 3 and increasingly independently by the end of year 4.

Leesons is a ‘Power of Reading’ school, where teaching sequences based on language rich texts are used to raise engagement and attainment in reading and writing for all pupils. We consolidate pupils’ writing skills, their vocabulary, their grasp of sentence structure and their knowledge of linguistic terminology. We teach the children to enhance the effectiveness of what they write as well as increase their competence. They learn to use more varied grammar, vocabulary and narrative structures from which they can draw to express their ideas. Children are taught correct joins for letters and by the end of the year all writing, across the curriculum, should be joined. Pupils’ spelling of common words should be correct, including common exception words and other words that they have learnt. In years 3 and 4, pupils should become more familiar with and confident in using language in a greater variety of situations, for a variety of audiences and purposes, including through drama, formal presentations and debate.

Mathematics

Mathematics is a creative and highly inter-connected discipline. The national curriculum for mathematics aims to ensure that all pupils:

• become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics so that pupils develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately
• reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language
• can solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions.

In years 3 and 4 the aim is that pupils become increasingly fluent with whole numbers and the four operations, including number facts and the concept of place value. They develop efficient written and mental methods. They learn to draw with increasing accuracy and develop mathematical reasoning so they can analyse shapes and their properties. Children learn to use measuring instruments with accuracy and make connections between measure and number. By the end of year 4, pupils should have memorised their multiplication tables up to and including the 12 multiplication table so by the end of Year 3 they should know their 2.

We use a ‘Mastery’ approach to mathematics, whereby  pupils move through the content at broadly the same pace. Pupils who grasp concepts rapidly are challenged through being offered rich and sophisticated problems before any acceleration through new content. Those who are not sufficiently fluent with earlier material consolidate their understanding, including through additional practice, before moving on.

Science

The principal focus of science teaching in lower key stage 2 is to enable pupils to broaden their scientific view of the world around them. They do this through exploring, talking about, testing and developing ideas about everyday phenomena and the relationships between living things and familiar environments, and by beginning to develop their ideas about functions, relationships and interactions. They ask their own questions about what they observe and make some decisions about which types of scientific enquiry are likely to be the best ways of answering them, including observing changes over time, noticing patterns, grouping and classifying things, carrying out simple comparative and fair tests and finding things out using secondary sources of information. They should draw simple conclusions and use some scientific language, first, to talk about and, later, to write about what they have found out.