WELCOME to SOUTH AFRICA CLASS where we try our best each day to be KIND, HARDWORKING, & RESILIENT TEAMMATES as we learn new things and practise our growing skills!
YEAR 3
Miss neel - teacher
Welcome to Year 3! We hope that you enjoy looking at our page. This is our first year in juniors so our learning is becoming more CHALLENGING AS WE DIVE DEEPER INTO OUR TOPICS AND MATERIAL. In English, we are continuing to become increasingly independent with our writing and we are looking at various different genres such as: instructions, RECOUNT< NON CHRONOLOGICAL REPORTS and narratives. In maths, we are enjoying a mastery approach to our lessons and using our Fluenti in 5 morning routine to take ownership of the new vocabulary adn methods. we are practising carefully to become more independent with our problem solving and reasoning. IN SCIEnce we'll be exploring our muscles and bones, healthy diets, plants, rocks and fossils, magnets and forces, and light! Our main leanring topics are very exciting! We'll get to explore history, geography, art, Design & technology and even music as we learn all about South Africa, ww2 & the evacuees, Volcanoes, prehistory From Stone age to Iron age and oceans of the world!
Hello to all the children and families of 2021’s Year 3 Class!
Looking ahead to next year I wanted to check in and introduce myself to you all. My name is Miss Neel and I’ll be the Year 3 teacher at Hayfield for the coming school year. Below you can find a video. In it I introduce myself some more and read one of my favourite stories for you.
I’d like to tell you a little bit about myself. I grew up in Northern California and I’ve lived and worked in lots of different countries including Denmark, South Korea and Vietnam. I am looking forward to bringing those experiences into our new class and working together with all of you to help our South Africa class be the best we can! Outside the classroom, I enjoy reading, hiking, dancing and photography. My birthday is December 29. I listen to all kinds of music and eat as much Mexican food as I can. It was so fun so meet most of you during my short visit to year 2. Mrs McErlean and Mrs Bowker have been telling me lots of lovely things about each of you! I look forward to getting to know more about each of you soon!
I know last year was full of ups and downs and lots of unexpected challenges for all of us, but watching how the Hayfield Primary community has come together has really been heart-warming to see. As we enjoy our well earned summer holidays, I hope all of you are able to recharge and have some fun! Stay safe and alert, but hopefully we will all be able to get outside, stay active, see some friends and family and enjoy the summer! I can’t wait to hear all about what you do this summer when we gather next school year!
I am so excited for all that we will learn and do next year! Exploring new topics, learning new skills, and reconnecting with our friends, we are sure to make lots of fun memories together!
Take care & see you soon, Miss Neel
Looking to spread the positivity and highlight all the great helpful choices made - Mrs Insley and I most look forward to our ‘clap cup’ celebrations just before home time. We'll collect and share positive choices and big effort moments that children make throughout the day.
Maths
In Maths our fluent in 4 morning routine is helping their confidence and use of mathematical vocabulary grow in leaps and bounds. Their confidence with subtraction, addition multiplication and division is growing nicely as they embed our many method and find the ones their own brains prefer most.
Working with money and learning coins was a fun few weeks and the practical nature of the questions and problems we solved had everyone ready to go shopping or pay the bill after a fun restaurant meal!
Coming up we've got measurement and fractions!
English
In English, the children gathered so many brilliantly descriptive and disgusting words to describe food as we worked together on a collection of monster pizza recipes. All the work we've been doing to polish our capital letters and full stop use has finally started to pay off and the step up in their final writes have made such a huge difference! We even shared our recipe book with the old classes because we were so proud of our writing. Linking into our volcanoes topics we read the story Escape from Pompeii. the drama of an entire city being taken by surprise as a gigantic volcano erupted kept them all glued to their seats. The descriptive and suspenseful stories they produced were some of the absolute best we've seen yet!
Moving into the Stone Age, our English units have us traveling back in time as we write historical fantasy stories about a character who falls back into the Stone Age and manages to make friends and survive. Coming up next we'll be receiving a package of our very own wooly mammoth! It'll be our job to write some very clear and detailed instructions for how to wash our mammoth to keep it clean!
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We have so many interesting things to learn about and exciting adventures to have together this year. To help you get excited, Here are some photos form last years class and a few HIGHLIGHT days!
Topic
Our Spring Topics are Volcanoes and life in the Stone Age. The children got so excited about the drama and danger volcanoes add to the world. They used their memories and artistic skills to make detailed scientific diagrams about what the insides of volcanoes look like. We looked at plate tectonics and plots come of the worlds volcanoes around the ring of fire using our most detailed and careful positioning skills. As an end of unit celebration we even had Pete the Geologist come in and give a wonderful talk full of hands on experiments. His extensive rock collection was so inspiring for the children to see!
We've just started our Stone age topic too. Already imagining the wild and natural way of life humans had back then has captured their imaginations! We're looking at the developments and progress made from the Paleolithic to Neolithic eras and the deep thought put into how skills and culture may have developed has greatly impressed both Mrs Insley and I. Over the next few weeks we'll get to explore Stone Age animals, beliefs, cave painting skills, weapons making as we take ourselves back in time to Britain's prehistory days. What a fun topic to explore together!
