Year 3 - Term 5

In Term 5, our Unit of Inquiry is ‘How The World Works’.  The central idea for our Unit of Inquiry is ‘Civilizations that do not adapt may not survive.’ 
The children will be following different lines of inquiry to help discover:

• How did the Romans rise to such great power?
• What were the contributing factors to the fall of the Roman Empire?
• Did the Romans find any new scientific discoveries or did they just use Greek science?

​Our Unit of Inquiry work will lead us to investigate why the Romans decided to invade Britain. We will consider the origins of the Roman army and how it developed and changed over time. We will spend time thinking about what made the uniform and equipment of the Roman army so effective and why the Romans decided to build new roads in Britain. We will also be looking at the features of a Roman bath and, in particular, the heating system that was used. The climax of our Unit of Inquiry work will see us immerse ourselves in a Roman experience day at school. This will involve dressing like Romans and experiencing some of their everyday lives from cooking to Latin lessons, formation marching and shield design.  

In English, we will using the core texts ‘Romans on the Rampage’ by Jeremy Strong and ‘Survivor: Escape From Pompeii’ by Jim Eldridge.  Our main focus will be writing to entertain so we will be using these stories to inspire our own narratives.  We will be using our previous learning on the use of adjectives to write descriptive passages including speech to add excitement to the action.  We may also consider different styles of narrative including historical, adventure and humour.
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In maths, we will be moving on to a unit on measurement and, in particular, we will be measuring length and perimeter.  We will build upon the children’s knowledge of centimetres and metres to measure lengths which include millimetres.  We will explore which of these units of measurement we would use to measure different objects.  To build upon this, we will also learn about equivalent lengths using different units of measurement before comparing, adding and subtracing lengths.  We will also learn to measure perimeters and to calculate perimeters of 2D shapes using our knowledge of their properties.  Towards the end of this term, we will move on to learning about fractions.  We will begin by making and recognising equal parts before recognising half, quarters and thirds of shapes.  We will then apply this learning to find simple fractions of amounts.  We will then move on to finding unit fractions (for example, ½, 1/3 and ¼) and non-unit fractions (for example, 2/3, ¾) of shapes.  When the children are secure in their understanding of fractions, we will explore equivalent fractions and will count in fractions also (for example, ¼, 2/4, ¾, 1, 1 and ¼, 1 and 2/4, 1 and ¾, 2).

You might like to join in our learning by…

• Researching a Roman villa such as Lullingstone Roman Villa. 
• Watching or reading ‘Horrible Histories: Rotten Romans’ and recording some interesting facts.
• Creating a Roman mosaic using a design and/or medium of your choice.
• Making a Roman timeline showing key events in the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
• Finding out about Roman Gods and the myths that are associated with them.  You could write your own Roman myth using the Gods as characters.
• Finding out about Roman games.  You could make one or write some instructions to play it.
• Choosing the one thing that interests you most about the Romans and creating a song/poem about it to perform at school.
• Drawing/tracing a map of Italy. 
• Finding out about a famous Roman and create a fact-file about him/her.
• Creating a comic strip about a day in the life of a Roman.