Welcome to our Primary 3 page

Hello and welcome to P3! The P3 teachers are Mrs Gardiner, Mrs Sweeney, Mrs Patterson and Mrs Shields. P3 is the first year of Key Stage 1 and is a very busy one where we learn lots! We have many new World Around Us topics, interesting ABL activities and new learning in Literacy and Numeracy to look forward to. We hope that all of the boys and girls enjoy their time in P3 and learn lots across the different areas of the curriculum. If you have any queries or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Keep checking this page over the course of the school year for regular updates and to see what’s going on in Primary 3.

Term 3 - Summer Term 2024

It’s hard to believe that we are almost at the end of Primary 3 already!! We have had an extremely busy, but fun filled year over in the P3 Block.

To finish off this term we will be moving on to our final World Around Us topic called ‘Down On The Farm’. We will be learning lots about what it’s like to be a farmer and about the type of jobs that a farmer has to do each day. In a few weeks we will be going on our school trip to Streamvale Farm where we will get to see first-hand what life on a working farm is like.

In literacy we will be moving on to persuasive writing. We will be using our powers of persuasion to encourage our parents, friends and even teachers to do things which they might not normally consider! We wonder who will be able to convince their teachers that homework should be stopped a week earlier than they had planned? 

In maths we will continue working at grouping in preparation for moving on to the times tables very soon. We will also be doing lots of revision of things which we have learnt throughout the year to prepare us for our move to P4.

Lots to fit in…..another very busy term!

Term 2B - March/April 

Welcome to yet another very busy term in P3! This term our World Around Us topic is called ‘Water, Water Everywhere’. We will be learning about the importance of water as well as doing lots of practical activities to teach us about how and why we need to save water. We will be thinking about water pollution and also learning about the water cycle by doing lots of fun experiments!

Our writing focus this term is on Report writing. We will be learning all about the features of a report including learning some new words such as headings, sub headings, introductions and conclusions. We will be looking at lots of example`s of reports as well as have a go at writing some of our own. This writing focus ties in well with all of the work that we have been doing in class to do with non-fiction texts where the children have been doing lots of searching through books looking for lots of different features.

In numeracy we have been using our shop role play area during Activity Based Learning and have been calculating totals and practising giving change. We are now able to work out our half and double facts to 100 which our teachers are very impressed by! In the next few weeks we hope to begin our new length topic so we will be measuring anything that will stay still for long enough in the classroom!

In ABL we have been doing a wide variety of different art activities from shimmering water patterns and colourful fish designs to paintings of beautiful spring flowers in the style of Georgia O’Keefe. The iPads have been out too during ABL as we have been using Book Creator to make ‘Guess who?’ books that give clues about our favourite characters from books that we have been reading and also for a coding activity called ‘Box Island’ which everyone has really enjoyed!

Term 2A – January/February 2024

This term our new World Around Us topic is On The Move! We will be looking at transport from around the world and from long ago and will explore the different features of many types of transport such as aeroplanes, cars and boats.  We will be recording the information that we have learnt in class during ICT time by creating fact sheets using WordArt to enhance our presentation!  Our ICT skills will continue to develop using iPads, this term focussing on Film and Amination.  We will be using Scratch Jr to create our own transport backgrounds and sprites.

Our new writing focus in Literacy is Narrative Writing.  We will read some stories to give us ideas and to help us understand what narrative writing is.  We will visualise and plan our own setting and characters and will look forward to working up to writing our very own narrative stories. We will apply what we have already learnt this year about adjectives to make our writing even more interesting! 

During Numeracy time, we will continue to do lots of practical activities which will help us to learn about giving change. We will have a shop in the classroom where the children can practise buying items using the correct amount of money or sometimes the shop keeper might have to give some change back. We will also be learning a new strategy called ‘rounding and adjusting’ to help us add on 9 in our head now that we are so good at using our ‘partitioning’ strategy to add on and take away 11.

Activity Based Learning continues to be one of our favourite times of the week!  One of the activities that we will be enjoying this term is creating our own versions of illustrations from ‘The Snowman’ book by Raymond Briggs. We will use his pictures as a starting point and then add in our own interpretations to create some wonderful pastel drawings. Our P3 resource area will soon be transformed into a creative zone. We will have the opportunity to work together to make transport models out of a range of junk materials. Our ‘Bridge Challenge’ will encourage us to problem solve so that we can come up with a solution which fills the design brief set to us by our teachers.

Watch this space for some photographs of all of the things that we have been up to!

Term 1B - November - December 2023

We have had a really busy start to the new half term and have been doing lots of new and interesting things over in the P3 classrooms. Our open area is looking fabulous with all of the super art work that we did last term!

This term our new WAU topic is called ‘Marvellous Me.’ We will be carrying out senses investigations during ABL and talking lots about our body and our feelings and emotions. We will be thinking about healthy eating and how we can keep our bodies fit and healthy.

In Literacy we have moved on from writing instructions to focus on ‘Recount Writing’ and will be doing lots of activities which will require us to think back and recall things which we have done in the past. We will be thinking about the key features of this style of writing such as writing in the past tense, writing the events in the order that they happened and using a range of different time related sentence starters.

Other literacy areas that we will focus on will be ordering words alphabetically using the second letter, past and present tense verbs and using question words.

In Numeracy we have moved on from our 50 rectangles to our 100 squares and have been learning some new strategies to make adding on and taking away in our heads a little easier. We know how to partition numbers to help us to add on and have been working hard to try to do lots of tricky calculations mentally without even needing to use our 100 squares. Our teachers are really impressed by how much we can do in our head these days! Soon we will be moving on to learn a little more about money. We will be doing lots of practical work counting out money, adding up totals and will be starting to learn about giving change just before we break up for Christmas.

Everyone loves it when it’s time for Activity Based Learning in P3 and this term we have lots of new activities planned which link together areas that we have been learning about in a fun and interactive way. We will be using iPads to make Pic Collages, pastels to make some beautiful calendars and playing lots of games to help reinforce areas of Maths and Literacy that we have learnt about.

We plan to do lots of fun art and craft activities in the run up to Christmas to help decorate our classrooms and help put everyone in the festive spirit.  

We have a lot to look forward to over the next little while and are very excited to get started!

Term 1A - September - October 2023

We have had a busy start to P3 and have already done lots of interesting new activities. We have also revised over some of the things that we had learnt in P2 to get us ready for the new challenges that lie ahead this year! 

Our topic this term is ‘Sow It Grow It’. We will be doing lots of practical activities related to this through our Activity Based Learning. We will be having a go at making our own clay hedgehogs which will be going into hibernation very soon. Another ABL activity will give us the chance to show off our creativity through a colour mixing task. We will be hunting outside for different shapes and sizes of leaves which we will use for our art work. We will be showing our teachers just how much we have learnt about the seasons through our season sort activity.

Our current writing focus is ‘Instructional Writing’. Our teachers began by giving us a challenge! They provided us with a variety of games which we weren't able to play unless we read and followed the instructions correctly! In the coming weeks we will be doing lots of fun practical activities related to following sets of instructions that our teachers give us and writing our own instructions for someone else to follow. During our Guided Reading sessions in class, we will be having fun predicting what will happen next in the stories that we read. For shared reading we have already been introduced to ‘Brenda the Brent Goose’ and look forward to finding out about all that she gets up to as she mirates from Canada to Strangford Lough for the winter months.

In Numeracy we will be doing lots of data handling. We hope to made a birthday pictograph and show information about our ages on a Carroll Diagram! We will also make a graph to show our heights. Our teachers plan to measure us again at different points throughout P3 to see how much we have grown.

Our teachers have lots more exciting things planned for the next few weeks. Keep checking to find out what new things we have been up to!