Welcome to your new class, fabulous foxes!
A warm welcome to all our Fox Tor families. I am looking forward to this year and a return to teaching Year 3 and 4!
In Fox Tor, we aim to make our learning enjoyable, whilst providing the necessary challenge to ensure all children make excellent progress. We have high expectations for all children and provide them with the platform to become successful, lifelong learners through our learning dispositions.
If you need to speak to me with regards to your child's learning, please contact me via Class Dojo or contact the office to arrange a time after school. I am not able to check Dojo messages during teaching time, so will not always respond straight away.
Please ensure that you regularly
check our class page to see what learning is taking place.
Please see below for details of what we are learning this year.
2023 - 2024 Learning Map
The following Learning Map outlines our learning in Fox Tor this year:
Spellings
As well as our daily Read Write Inc. Spelling scheme, we are also thinking about the statutory spellings for Years 3 and 4. The children need to be able to spell all of these words independently within their writing by the end of Year 4.
In addition to this, the Year 3 children will be revising their spelling of the Key Stage 1 statutory spelling words, which they should be spelling independently in their writing.
Can you please support your children with their spellings at home by encouraging them to practise their spellings using Spelling Shed and by quizzing them regularly.
Thank you.
English
Our English lessons are based on a wide range of high quality and significant children's literature chosen to engage, challenge and support children to be critical readers and confident and informed writers. All National Curriculum requirements of grammar, spelling, vocabulary, literary language and composition are embedded leading towards a variety of purposeful and exciting shorter, longer and extended writing outcomes where the audience and purpose is clear.
Our first text this half-term is 'The BFG' by Roald Dahl. During this unit, the children will engage with different genres of writing including diary entries, character descriptions and letters. For their final independent write, the children will be planning and writing their own fantasy adventure.
We will also be using sections of the story within our Guided Reading sessions.
The children used place value grids and counters to represent a range of 3- and 4-digit numbers.
Times Tables
Times tables are an essential aspect of maths and a quick recall of the tables is vital for much of the maths that your children will encounter as they continue on their school journey. All children are expected to be fluent in the recall of the multiplication and division facts for all of the times tables (up to 12x) by the end of Year 4. This is really important as they will need them to support them with the maths that they encounter in upper Key Stage 2.
We will be practising our times tables each week in school using Times Table Rockstars and other resources to make this learning fun and engaging. As well as this, it is important that you encourage your children to engage with Rockstars at home on a regular basis.
Please see the below poster for a full list of all of the times tables.
English
Our current focus for English is Escape from Pompeii, with the final objective being to write a newspaper report.
So far, the children have used their prior knowledge to infer some historical items. We will be identifying the specific features and layout of newspaper report and how these impact the reader, whilst also looking at the disaster that occurred which links to our current Theme learning.
Guided reading
Our guided reading focuses around the inference map shown below. Throughout the year, we will use a wide range of texts and genres. This will allow the children to gain a deeper understanding of the different styles of text and identify similarities and differences.
Maths
We have adopted a mastery approach in our Maths learning. This approach allows the children the opportunity to master different methods, which they apply to their reasoning and problem solving activities, as well as across the curriculum. The children use concrete resources to aid their learning, before moving on to pictorial and abstract methods.
Our current area of learning in Maths is Fractions.
It is vital that all children have a secure knowledge of their times tables to aid their learning across other areas of the curriculum.
Physical Education
Our scheduled PE days are Thursday and Friday. It's essential that your child comes to school in their PE kits on these days. Our current focuses for PE are Swimming and Athletics. This will develop our learning of skills to succeed in a range of games, physical activity and sports.
We are extremely lucky to have the opportunities to attend a variety of clubs throughout the week.
Theme learning
Geography/History
In Oke Tor, we take real pride in our History and Geography Theme Learning.
Our current theme is Geography based and is all about Earthquakes - our big question is 'Why do some earthquakes cause more damage than others?'
We will be become geographers and analyse a range of resources to answer our question.
Science
We are getting our scientific heads on every week through our current theme of 'Electricity' and Explorify sessions. The children will have the opportunities to develop their understanding through hands-on investigations and creating circuits.
Please find all of our knowledge organisers and word mats below.
Knowledge Organisers
Home Learning
As well as learning in school, it is essential that children also participate in home learning too. The expectation is that all children read regularly by themselves and with an adult. The focus is on both decoding words and comprehension.
Children are also expected to access Times Table Rockstars and Spelling Shed, with specific tasks set by the class teacher. This should be a minimum of five games on Spelling Shed and 10 games on TTRS, with three games being on the Studio platform. We are currently embedding our KIRFs (Key Instant Recall Facts) home learning. This is best practised little and often to support them with learning and remembering more. Please find this half term's knowledge organisers and KIRFs below.
Maths
We have adopted a mastery approach in our Maths learning. This approach allows the children the opportunity to master different methods, which they apply to their reasoning and problem solving activities, as well as across the curriculum. The children use concrete resources to aid their learning, before moving on to pictorial and abstract methods.
Our first unit in maths this half-term is Number: Place Value.
During this unit, the children be thinking about numbers to 1,000 (Y3) and 10,000 (Y4). They will be learning to represent these numbers using different apparatus (such as Base 10 and place value counters), partition these numbers in a variety of ways (e.g. 589 = 500 + 80 + 9) and locate these numbers on number lines. They will approach this in small steps, with each building on the previous to help develop their confidence and understanding of using these numbers.