Cedar Year 3 | Fir Tree Junior School

Welcome to Cedar Class, Year 3 2025-2026.

Cedar Class has 25 children. The Cedar team are Mrs Giles (Mon-Thurs), Mrs Downs (Fri). Our teaching assistant is Mrs Hall and she is in class every morning. Making learning fun is our speciality! There are so many fun things to look forward to in the year ahead.

Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you ever have any queries or concerns.

Please could all parents teach their children how to tie their shoe laces. Thank you.

Term 2 PE continues to be on Monday and Thursday. This term we will be learning football and netball. Please wear your PE kit to school on these days and bring extra warm layers for cold days and sun hats for the heat!

Please bring a coat to school everyday. Children need fresh air and exercise so they can learn best and we do go out in light rain. Remember a water bottle every day. A piece of fruit at playtime really helps children to concentrate on learning up to lunch time. Many thanks.

Spelling lists year 1, 2 and 3/4

Useful Information and Links

BBC bitesize

Times Tables TimesTables

Times Tables Hit the Button

Current News Newsround

Dance Mat Typing An opportunity to learn touch typing skills

Times Tables TTRock Stars

Reading Information and Great Book Ideas

Online Reading Read Theory

Love Reading for kids Sign up to this website to get access to amazing free chapters of reading books. This is great for trying new authors and book types!

Minecraft Coding Due to popular demand, this is the link for the Minecraft Coding!

Contact Us

Please leave your message below and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Term 2

Beginning a science project about light.

Look inside the peep hole of the first box number (pictured above), and what do you see? Nothing! Only darkness could be seen.

Shine a light through the hole (second picture above) and look again. What do you see this time? A green plastic dragonfly! Why couldn't the dragon fly be seen the first time we looked?

What is darkness? Darkness is the absence of light.

Have you ever been in complete darkness, really, really complete darkness where no light can peep under a door or through a crack in the curtains?

Try to find somewhere to experience it. How does it feel? Can your eyes actually adjust to the darkness as some people believe?

Stonehenge Artwork

Some of our family Christmas tree decorations

Visit from the police about celebrating the differences in people

Developing skills in using watercolours

The fossilisation process - can you remember the process?

Learning about adverbs and imperatives through playing a game

Art - Continuous line drawing. Learning to look carefully and draw slowly without taking our hand off the page. You can go back over lines and create darker shades. Why not try it for yourself?

As part of our Stone Age project we have been reflecting on early drawings. We imagined how people in the Stone Age communicated, what they had to say and even what they had available to use. Some of the real earliest works were in deep caves and featured bison, horses, hunting scenes and handprints. They were generally created using natural earthy colours from minerals and charcoal, and applied by using fingers or twigs. Many real examples can be seen in France, Spain and Africa and can be over 40,000 years old.

Armed with a piece of charcoal, piece of paper and the instruction to use a hand only, children created many different hand shapes, shades and different messages. What do you think these pictures communicate?

Recreating cave art

Term 1

PE with Mr Mule - Netball

Music - Developing our listening skills and responding to Mussorgsky's 'Night on a Bare Mountain'. Without knowing anything at all about the music, the class were asked to respond by drawing what they thought the music suggested. They had to imagine that they were watching the music as a film. They came up with fabulous ideas proving their thinking by referring to the volume, (dynamics), speed, (tempo), highs and lows of instrument voices, (pitch) and more!

Some of our spooky Halloween poems showing what we have learnt about onomatopoeia, similes and alliteration

Getting hands on with rocks! Our thanks go to the British Geological Survey for the loan of the rock box.

Take a scrap of newspaper and a pen.... what character can you turn it into?

Handwriting - We take pride in our handwriting and have the goal of working towards getting a pen to use!

Music - Learning the recorder

A snapshot of our PSHE learning

Previous Year 3 Class

Our visit to Hill End to learn more about the Romans

Exploring role play to develop our ideas for writing in role as a Roman soldier

Designing Roman Coins

Term 6

Art - Drawing a Roman Soldier

DT - Moving parts. We have been exploring different techniques and mechanisms for making pop up books.

Roman Mosaics

History detectives - What could this artefact be?

Poetry verse based on 'Storm at Sea' by Alexander Rakic. This poems explores the use of onomatopoeia, similes and metaphor. We thought of different synonyms to find the best word choices.

Art - Some finished artwork for 'Tempest At Sea'

Term 5

Art exploration

Haiku Poems about the beginning of the Tempest - a three line poem consisting of just 17 syllables. Five syllables on the first and third line, and seven on the second line.

Dramatising the very beginning of the story 'The Tempest' by William Shakespeare.

Term 4

Maths - In maths we have been learning strategies called partitioning, adjusting and redistributing. We have been practising using all these strategies and thinking about which is the best strategy for each sum so we can be efficient, or 'lazy' mathematicians as we call it in Cedar Class!

RE - Learning about Shrove Tuesday with Mrs Downs and having a pancake race.

Art - Paper weaving was the skill we developed for some fish to go on display in St Mary's Church as part of the Jonah and the Whale schools collaboration concert.

Science - We were exploring ideas about forces and magnetism. We were challenged to find magnetic and non-magnetic items around the classroom. We used vocabulary such as repel, attract to explain our thinking. We then made magnetic mazes with plastic bottles.

Gardening - Mace has been busy in the garden. He has planted up a half barrel with daffodil bulbs and he is so well mannered and enthusiastic in his work, reports Mel, our gardener. There will be more jobs too as he can keep planting things for the pollinators to attract more wildlife into our school garden.

Term 3

A fantastic and memorable visit to 'Crocodiles of the World' (Click on pictures to enlarge.)

The Enormous Crocodile show preparation and rehearsals

Science - Exploring ideas about foods and different food groups. We looked at the Eatwell plates and considered what is a balanced, healthy diet. We had fun creating movements for the different groups to remember them. The children then called out different foods to see if others could remember which group they belonged to.

Cricket with 'Chance to Shine'

Going on an angle hunt around the classroom

Recorders - Learning to play 'High, low, Earwig go!' Notes high D and G. Reading and following the notes, listening closely to the backing track, and playing with control.

Shape and Angles - exploring ideas

Term 2

Christmas Dinner! Many thanks to Siva, Sanusha and the entire team of helpers for a fabulous feast.

Maths Game

Gardening with Mel

It's Panto Time! We all had a fabulous time! Oh yes we did!

Music - Learning to read notes by their position on a stave. A rhyme is helping us to remember the name of the notes. 'Every Good Boy Deserves Football' and FACE.

Science - Exploring shadows

Art - Drawing an outline, shade and shadows

Science -Problem solving how to light proof a den

Geography - The Artic

Orienteering and a Pudsey challenge for Children in Need.

Dance

Dance with Emma Seymour.

The children talked about what they knew about the Stone Age, then they thought about movements for Hunter Gatherers.

In the lesson they learnt what a 'gesture' movement was and explored working at different levels. It was great fun and revealed that there are many talented dancers in our class!

Design Technology - Sewing

A whole school challenge was to recreate a famous piece of artwork. Cedar Class recreated The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicholaes Tulp (1632) by Rembrandt.

English - Learning the features of a non-chronological report text

Non-chronological report writing

When learning to write features of different types of text, we often learn and practise vocabulary. For non-chronological text features we have looked at interesting sentence starters, causal conjunctions, generalisers, and the language of comparison.

Interestingly, Surprisingly, Amazingly, Intriguingly,

These are all examples of interesting sentence starters which hook the reader in and keep the text exciting. We learn that each of these words would have a comma after it when used at the start of a sentence.

most all some many a few usually occasionally the vast majority

These are all examples of generalisers. They often tell us more information such as how many and how often. These types of words are useful in report writing to aid understanding.

caused by results in so so that because therefore

These are examples of causal conjunctions. They are words or phrases that give reasons or explanations for something in a sentence.

like unlike similar to related to differs from

These are examples of language of comparison. By comparing and contrasting people can learn about similarities and differences and understand subjects better.

We rehearse sentences orally using many examples before we begin to write them down. The more we practise, the more confident we get.

Art - The Superpower of Looking! An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768) by Joseph Wright of Derby

We looked at this picture and were able to zoom in and look at things closely to inspect the finer detail.

We noticed the feelings of all the different people within the picture. It differed greatly from person to person and their perspective of things!

The clothing of the people was quite a talking point and helped us to place this picture in history.

We supposed the professions of people and family relationships and what the interests of people were.

We discussed the light and dark within the picture and how it made us feel. The tiny moon through the window was observed.

The more we looked, the more we saw! We had great discussions and everybody noticed many different things.

How good is your superpower of looking!

Christmas Card Competition

Science - Light

Take One Picture

Take One Picture - Completing half of the picture using pastels

Responding to the portrait - What do we see, imagine, hear, feel, and smell?

PE - Our first netball lesson with Mr Mule

Our Visitor, PC Haynes from Thames Valley Police

Learning about the artist, Guiseppe Arcimboldo

Maths - we use lots of manipulatives to prove our thinking and to create visual images in our mind.

Our science project is all about 'rocks'

Exploring the rocks box we loaned from The British Geological Survey

Art - Using watercolours to create sunset or sunrise and then creating the silhouettes of the stones from black paper

Cave paintings

Some of the facts we have read about Stonehenge

Stonehenge is the world's most famous stone circle.

It is in Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire which is about 2 hours from London.

The land is flat.

Early British people settled here.

Some people believed the stones had special powers.

The bluestones at Stonehenge come from Wales and they are not actually blue, they are grey!

Some of the sandstones used are 4-7metres high and weigh as much as eight female elephants!

Some of the stones have fallen. Some are missing. Others have been damaged by the weather.

Nowadays, many tourists travel to England to see the stones.

After 'clay play' where children experimented with mark marking, they recreated these fantastic clay pots from the Stone Age.

Science - Learning about the process of fossilisation.

Looking closely to develop skills in Art by taking a line for a continuous walk

French

Bonjour! Salut! Since the beginning of the academic year, we have been learning the French letters of the alphabet and several phonic sounds.

At the time of writing we have learnt these phonics; ch, oi, ou, on, i, ique, ille and in. We have looked at examples of words containing these phonemes such as; cinq (5), six (6), cheval (horse), oisseau (bird), famille (family), musique (music) and cochon (pig) . French accents are coming on really well within the class.

Below is some of the work completed in the last academic year to give you a flavour of what we get up to in Year 3.

Term 6 -The Tempest by William Shakespeare and Plants

Maths - Recreating right angles with body shapes, then going on an angles hunt in the school grounds to find examples of acute, obtuse and right angles.

We have been writing our own beginning of The Tempest story. We have explored ‘ninja’ vocabulary through work with a thesaurus and generated similes, personification and more! We couldn’t be more proud of the work ALL the children in writing and the progress they are making.

A strong hurricane was erupting over the island. Palm trees were cut, ripped and sliced. The gale hissed and slashed off their branches which sent them falling through the air uncontrollably.

On a sandy beach, not far from the mouth of his cave, stood Prospero, the king wizard, his white lily hair and white lily beard streamed out in the hissing wind. His jet black robes flapped around.

By Esme

Long, long away there was an island perished by a devilish storm. Hurricanes, gales and tornadoes, cracked and thundered. The heavy wind blew and sliced the poor palm trees. They rotated like dancers doing great backflips. The gales squealed as loud as ten thousand lions roaring at the same time. The palm trees that slouched were already in the distance. The storm, which screeched and howled, got heavier and heavier.

On a wet, miserable beach stood mute Prospero, the hairy, wrinkly wizard. Raging, wild weather yelled into the ears on the wizard. In the dark, blood-curdling cave, his raven black robe fluttered furiously.

By Milan

An aggressive, violent, horrific and torturous storm was raging over the island. Palm trees arched and the branches were crooked. They twisted and turned as flew through the air.

On a stormy beach, not far away from the mouth of the cave, Prospero, the evil wizard, was positioned with his snowy white hair and beard streaming out in the wind. His charcoal robes were flapping around him.

By Ryan