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Ballykeel Primary School & Nursery Unit

Year 3

Welcome to Primary 3

We hope you had a lovely summer! We know that the children will be looking forward to seeing their friends again. We will be doing lots of activities which will help your child settle back into routine again. We will regularly publish information and pictures via Seesaw, so remember to keep looking out for these updates. It’s a good way of keeping in touch with your child’s learning and progress.

We also welcome our new team members Mrs McBurney and Mrs McKeown (P3CM) and Mrs Millar and Miss McKergan (P3CMC).

Please ensure that your child has everything they need for their school day.

  • Healthy break in a disposable bag (name on the bag)
  • 2 sharpened HB pencils
  • 1 Pritt stick (white)
  • 1 rubber
  • 1 sharpener
  • Pencil case
  • A 12 pack of colouring pencils
  • Box of tissues

Homework

On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights the children will have:

  • Reading
  • Spellings
  • Tables

Written Homeworks:

Monday: Literacy homework (game or written activity)

Wednesday: Numeracy homework (game or written activity)

Thursday: Make a special effort to revise tables and spellings for the Friday Test the next day.

We thought you might appreciate these Homework Hints.

Preparation

Your child will need:

  • A quiet place
  • A flat surface
  • A sharp pencil, a rubber
  • Time-don’t leave homework until it’s late

Once your child has completed his/her homework, please make sure you sign it.

Tips for learning spellings

  1. Look at the words
  2. Say them
  3. 3. Cover them
  4. Write them
  5. Check them

Have your child spend some time learning spellings for him/herself. Teach them to use these steps.

Ask your child to write down the words as you call them out.

Make sure they have completed the spellings section in their Spelling Booklets.

Learning Tables

  • Have your child say or write tables at least 3 times
  • Jumble up the order of the tables
  • Ask some ‘quick fire’ questions to develop good mental maths skills

Reading

It is important to practise reading aloud. Choose a few pages to read aloud, focusing on fluency and expression.

Discuss what your child has read and sign the reading log book.

February- March

Here are some of the things we plan to do until Easter.

As you already know our theme is called ‘Time for a Change’ and within this we are going to discuss and decide on

  • Changes in animals- how they grow and develop – lifecycles and metamorphosis
  • Changes in plants as they grow.
  • Changes in substances – steam to water to ice
  • What happens when we cook food? – E.g. baking, toasting, melting, freezing etc.

Please send in anything you think might ‘link-in’ with this theme – books, pictures etc.

Mathematics

This month we will be continuing to learn tables each night so children have quick recall of number facts. We have done lots of practical work in subtraction and become much more confident with this area. We will continue to use our knowledge of subtraction to find change from amounts of money e.g. 10p, 20p and 50p.

We are aiming to know our numbers to 100. We should be able to count to this number and recognise all numbers in written form. We will use little ‘word problems’ to help your child develop problem solving skills and decide whether to add or subtract to get the correct answer. Please continue to help them with this at home by giving them little puzzles to work out for themselves.

In measures we will do some activities involving weighing things (hopefully not the teachers!) and measuring liquids. They will become more familiar with terms like ‘heavier’ ‘lightest’ and ‘half-full’ ‘empty’. We will also measure time. We will begin by revising over the ‘o’clock, half past, quarter past, quarter to’ in analogue time and then move on to telling these times using digital clocks.

Please help your child learn the months of the year and keep practicing the little rhyme:

‘30 days has September,

April, June and November.

All the rest have 31

Except February alone,

Which has 28 days clear

And 29 in each leap year.’

 Literacy

In Grammar, we will revise terms such as adjectives and nouns and verbs. We will learn what adverbs are and how to use and recognise them in sentences.

The children always enjoy learning compound words and they will be doing some work on this over the month- joining two words together to make a new word eg butter and fly to become butterfly.

Good punctuation and handwriting are both essential as always in every piece of written work so please ensure that children adhere to all handwriting rules in their homework. Tall letters and capitals to the top of the line and small letters all the same height.

Our literacy focus this year is ‘reading comprehension’. Please continue to use the bookmarks which your child received last term. The little dice game helps them to focus on the questions they need to ask so they can better understand text.

Thank-you for your continued support!

C. Montgomery and C. McConnell

 

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