In Year 3 this term, we are finding out ‘How We Organise Ourselves.’ The central idea for our Unit of Inquiry is ‘Journeys create change and can lead to new opportunities.’ As part of our inquiry we will be trying to answer the following:
- What caused there to be so many railways in Great Britain and what opportunities did the railways create?
- How do the railways use technology to improve?
- How can we use new inventions to improve our lives?
 |  |
We will be finding out how the railways and trains developed in Great Britain and why they were so popular. We will also be looking at the impact that they had on people, both positive and negative. To help us with our inquiry we will be developing our fieldwork sketching skills to look at how these skills helped record the development of the railways and studying maps of the our country, using the compass points, symbols and keys.
 |  |
To further our inquiry, we will be looking more closely at the working parts of steam engines including levers, linkages and pneumatic systems. We will then use some of these in our own designs. We will also be looking at how the invention of electricity changed the lives of people working and living by the railway. We will investigate how electricity works and create and record circuits of our own.
In English we will use our learning from our unit of inquiry to help inspire our writing. We will be looking at how advertising campaigns and persuasive writing helped the growth of the railways. We will also be looking at poetry and investigating rhyme and rhythm and the different ways we can set them out on the page.
In maths this term we will be focusing on statistics, measure and fractions. In our statistics work we will look at a range of ways of recording and displaying data including drawing pictograms and bar charts. Our measure work will teach the children how to measure length accurately and work out the perimeter of a given shape. In our fractions unit we will learn that a fraction is an equal part of a whole and begin to find fractions of a set of objects.
