Primary 3 – Term 1 | Mount Carmel Primary School

Welcome back to all of our Primary 3 children! It is fantastic to be back at Mount Carmel and we are all delighted to see our friends and are really looking forward to learning lots of new things this term!

Literacy

Our class novel this term is ‘The Owl Who was Afraid of the Dark’ by Jill Tomlinson. We are really enjoying reading this chapter book and finding out how Plop overcomes his fear of the dark. We are completing comprehension tasks related to the text and enjoying cross-curricular links such as Outdoor Education.

We are also working in our reading groups and continuing to complete tasks linked to our Bug Club books. In doing this, we are making predictions before reading. We are also looking at the differences between fiction and non-fiction texts.

Writing

In writing, we are writing personal accounts and focussing on including capital letters, full stops, fingers spaces and ensuring that our letters are formed correctly. We are leaning how to write independently, using appropriate punctuation and ordering our sentences to make sure our writing is structured and makes sense.

Spelling

We are continuing to use the Active Literacy spelling programme. We are revising our known phonemes (such as sh, th, wh) and introducing a different phoneme and spelling words each week. We are also practising our common words (words that appear frequently in our writing such as friend, that). We will use say, make/break, read and write to aid understanding of how words are made. Also we are beginning to use our knowledge of the alphabet to use a dictionary to locate words.

Numeracy

In numeracy we have been revising our numbers to 100. We are consolidating our number bonds to 20 using both addition and subtraction strategies. We are also looking for patterns in the 2, 5 and 10 times tables and moving onto link this with division. We have been practising skip counting and are starting to transfer these skills to our times tables. On a Thursday we will work with Mrs McIntrye on Beyond Number concepts such as 3D shapes and information handling.

Health and Wellbeing

As part of our PATHS lessons we have revisited the characters Twiggle, Henrietta, Duke and Daphne. In doing this we have discussed how to be a good friend and read some of the PATHS story books. We have also made our own class charter with a Lego theme and discussed our rights and responsibilities. During PATHS lessons we have spoken about the importance of rules and that we have rules to keep us safe. We have started to introduce our Pupil of the Day and look forward to giving compliments to our classmates and making them feel special. We will continue to learn more about different emotions and strategies that we can use to calm down.