Year 3 Curriculum and Day-to-Day Overview

In Chess class, our day starts with a calm soft start to prepare the children for learning. They are able to come into school and participate in a calming activity such as reading, spelling practice or handwriting. This gives them an opportunity to settle into the school day and make contact with the staff in the classroom if needed. 

Our day officially starts at 9am with a Maths lesson. We start each lesson with an independent 'flashback 4' activity, where the children have the opportunity to revisit some of their previous learning and get their brains warmed up for the lesson. Then we follow the Power Maths scheme, where the children have the opportunity to learn and practice new skills using a range of concrete, abstract and pictorial resources. 

At 10am we complete a whole class guided reading sessions using our class text and the VIPERS approach. On a Monday, we focus on the prediction and vocabulary skills, on Tuesdays we focus on retrieval skills and then on Wednesday and Thursday we choose a different skill to focus on each week (these could be inferring, explaining or summarising). In these lessons, the children also get the opportunity to practice their reading skills and develop fluency when reading aloud. On a Friday, the children spend this session using the skills from the week to complete a set of comprehension questions independently.

After break, we complete our writing sessions. These sessions are focussed around a key text and a purpose for writing. Each lesson starts with a grammar warm up where the children learn and practice key grammar skills needed for writing. In the lessons, the children build up their understanding of spelling, punctuation, grammar, structure and purpose to support them in completing a piece of extended writing at the end of the unit. In addition to the writing lessons, we also complete one spelling shed lesson per week and daily handwriting practice in the afternoons. 

The afternoons look different each day as we teach a range of topics such as Science, PE, RE, Art, History, Computing, PSHE, Music and French. Key information is that the children will have PE on a Tuesday and Friday so will need to be in PE kit and we visit the Library on a Thursday afternoon. 

For more information on what we teach each day please see our class timetable below: