Happy New Year Everyone! We hope you have all had an enjoyable break.

We are very much looking forward to welcoming the children back to school. They made amazing progress both academically and emotionally in the autumn term and we know they will continue to build on this in the spring term.

It was lovely to see so many of you at the Nativity and we are sure you share our pride in the performance your children gave. It is not easy to perform in a large hall in front of so many people and we felt they really gave their best.

Onto the new term…..

We have lots of exciting learning and experiences in store. Here is a flavour of what we will be learning about in the different subjects:

In Maths we will be starting to introduce the children to more formal recording methods for multiplication and division, before learning about length and perimeter, fractions, and mass and capacity. White Rose Home Learning videos are a great way to support your child with their maths learning and mirror the lessons we are delivering in class: https://whiteroseeducation.com/parent-pupil-resources/maths/home-learning?year=year-3-new

The children have shown wonderful imaginations and a real love of language in English in year 3. We aim to extend this further as we read the Story of Black Rock, learn about writing instructions clearly, and recreate the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. In addition, we are all looking forward to celebrating World Book Day on 5^th March and sharing our reading experiences.

Thank you for all you have done this term to support your child’s learning at home. We will continue to send home Maths homework and a reading comprehension every fortnight and to encourage the children to practise their spellings on EdShed. All logins can be found in reading records.

Rocks and soil is our topic in Science this term before we move onto finding out about Energy and Light. We will be celebrating Science week in the week commencing 9^th March. The theme for the week is “Curiosity”

In the first half of this term we will be learning about emails and branching databases in Computing; finding out about Our World, including longitude and latitude in Geography; and extending our spoken and written French to be able to talk about animals. We have sent out the PSHE topics via Parentmail and will be moving onto RE in the second half of the term when we will be answering the question “Is scripture central to religion?”

We will continue to visit our lovely school library once a fortnight on Monday afternoons. Please can you ensure that children have their library books in their bags on Mondays. Reading books will continue to be changed every Tuesday but please can you ensure that your child has their reading book in their book bag every day so that they can read them at school either individually or with an adult.

PE days have changed this term as we will be doing outdoor PE on Wednesdays and indoor PE on Mondays. Please can you ensure that your child has suitable outdoor PE clothing for the cold weather (please see the uniform policy).

Swimming will take place in the summer term, as will the Faith Tour in Bedford.

We look forward to seeing you all when the children present their mid-year reports at Pupil Learning Conferences on 24^th and 26^th February, and at Mothers’ Day breakfasts in March.

Here’s wishing everyone a very happy spring term.

Mrs Oestreicher and Mrs Lupton