Nurseries Road, Wheathampstead, Herts, AL4 8TP
Year Three
Hello and welcome to Year 3
Autumn 2025
Year 3 have made a fantastic start to the school year! The children have settled brilliantly into Key Stage 2, working hard to establish their class rules and expectations. They are already showing great maturity as they take on new responsibilities and rise to the challenges of being in the upper end of the school.
Our History topic, ‘Stone Age to Iron Age’, has been a real hit! Through engaging lessons, artefact exploration and rich texts such as The Stone Age Boy, the children have been transported back to pre-historic times. They’ve been fascinated by palaeolithic cave paintings, Mesolithic tools and Neolithic settlements like Skara Brae. It’s been wonderful to see how confidently they can discuss the key changes that occurred across these periods — their enthusiasm and recall have been outstanding!
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In French, Year 3 have been eager language learners. We began by exploring where in the world French is spoken, locating France on a map of Europe, and discovering some surprising facts — did you know France borders eight different countries and that 29 countries speak French as their national language? The children have also enjoyed learning how to greet one another, ask how someone is feeling, and describe the French flag and capital city — all in French!
Art lessons have been filled with colour and creativity as we’ve studied Vincent van Gogh. The children explored his passion for self-portraits, inspired by his use of expressive brushstrokes, before creating their own Van Gogh-style portraits. We then turned our attention to Starry Night, learning about the story behind this famous painting and recreating it using pencil and watercolour. The results were beautiful!
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In Maths, we began by revisiting place value, using dienes, counters and place value charts to deepen understanding of 3-digit numbers. The children have practised rounding to the nearest ten and hundred, and explored a range of mental addition and subtraction strategies. More recently, we’ve moved on to written methods, estimation, and using the inverse to check our answers — with growing confidence!
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We’re now looking forward to the second half of the Autumn Term, when we’ll begin exciting new Geography and D&T projects, dive into our new English texts The Wild Robot and The Iron Man, and continue building on our Maths learning.
Summer 2025
Wow – what an amazing summer term it has been in Year 3! We can’t believe how much we’ve done and how much we’ve learned. It’s been our best term yet!
One of our favourite things this term was writing a non-chronological report all about Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry! We imagined we were magical students and created a school prospectus to tell new witches and wizards all about Hogwarts. We loved describing the enchanted ceiling in the Great Hall and the exciting lessons like Potions and Defence Against the Dark Arts. We ensured we included all the features of a non chronological report such as an introductory paragraph, subheadings, clear paragraphs and third person narrative. We beautifully illustrated our work too and it made us wish we could go there for real!
Another highlight was our incredible class visit to the Roald Dahl Museum. We learned so much about his life and where he got his ideas from. The best part was walking to Roald Dahl’s final resting place, where we quietly laid a beautiful handmade card and flowers. It felt really special to say thank you to someone who has brought so much joy through his books.
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Speaking of Roald Dahl books, we read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and it was so enjoyable! We invented and designed our own magical sweets and their packaging, and wrote detailed character descriptions.
In Geography, we learned all about earthquakes—what causes them and what happens when they strike. We even designed and tested our own buildings to see if they could survive an earthquake. It was tricky at first, but so exciting when our structures stayed standing! We discovered that using triangles in our designs strengthened our structures and pyramid shapes helped the structure to withstand tremors.
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In maths, we’ve been learning how to tell the time, which is really useful. Now we can read both digital and analogue clocks and we’ve been practising by helping our families know when it’s time to go out or when dinner is ready. Most importantly, we no longer need to ask our teacher how long it is until lunch!
This term has been full of fun, friendship, and learning. We can’t wait to see what awaits in Year 4!
