Y3 English

This half term Year 3 are going to be reading Leon and the Place Between by Angela McAllister and Grahame Baker-Smith.

Wanting to prove to his brothers and sisters that magic really exists, Leon volunteers to be in Abdul Kazam’s magic show and gets transported to a mysterious world. Filled with rabbits, doves, playing cards and magician’s assistants – among other things – if a magician can make it disappear, it will end up in the Place Between.

The children are already so engaged in this story and can’t wait to read more in our literacy lessons over the coming weeks. Using this book as a focus, we will be working on writing diary entries, descriptions and upleveling our writing ready for Year 4!

Watch the video below to hear the text from start to finish.

This half term in Year 3, the children have been working towards writing their own newspaper reports of the events of the volcanic eruption in Pompeii in 79AD.

Over the last few weeks they have been building up their skills, looking at structural features, the language used and planning and writing their own newspaper reports. Today they published their work using the Chromebooks.

Here are some examples of our amazing work!

In Year 3 this half term we are going to be reading Escape from Pompeii by Christina Balit.

The story tells the tale of two children forced to flee their beloved Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupts. While reading this book the children will be writing setting descriptions of Pompeii before, during and after the eruption, as well as writing newspaper reports of the events of that fateful day in 79AD.

The children are already so engaged with this story, asking lots of questions and linking their understanding of the story to their knowledge of volcanoes (our current Geography topic). We are so excited to keep reading this story!

Today, Year 3 made their very own ‘marvellous medicines’!

The children followed a set of instructions to make their very own concoctions. They used the ingredients water, mouthwash, glitter, sweets and food colouring, and mixed it all up before putting them in their own little jars.

Have a look at our creations below!

This half term in Year 3 we have been reading the story of Stone Age Boy. We created a story map to help us remember the order of the story, and rewrote the story using this to help us. This week we are moving on to the ‘innovation’ stage, changing one or two key parts of the story to make a new one. Today we used post-it notes to stick over our original story map and changed 3 key elements:

• the character that Stone Age Boy meets
• the animal that frightens Stone Age Boy
• the special place his friend takes him to in the Stone Age

Once we have changed these aspects of the story, we will rewrite it with our innovations.

This half term, Year 3 will be reading ‘Stone Age Boy’ by Satoshi Kitamura. The story revolves around a young boy who finds himself back in time in the Stone Age! He meets a young girl and they become friends, having lots of interesting adventures together.

In our literacy lessons we will be focusing on narrative. We will be using this story to write our own retelling following Talk for Writing, then eventually we will write our own narrative where the main character travels in time.