Steephill Independent School and Pre-School
‘Pupils are at the heart of everything we do’
- Steephill Independent School
- Off Castle Hill, Fawkham, Longfield, DA3 7BG
- 01474 702107
- secretary@steephill.co.uk
Class 3 key information:
Welcome to Class 3's home page
2022 - 2023
Welcome to the Class 3 web page.
Check this page regularly for updates, class information and photographs of all the exciting things we will be getting up to.
Welcome to Class 3's home page
2021 - 2022
End of Academic Year 2020-2021
Welcome To Class 3's Page!
2019-2020
Please see below our Class Timetable, Homework Timetable
and
Termly Overview for the Autumn Term
9.9.19.
Dear Parents (and Class 3)
Just a quick note to report what a great start Class 3 have all made to joining Upper School!
They all look so grown up in their Upper School uniforms don't they?
Well done to everybody and I look forward to seeing as many parents as possible on Wednesday at 3pm for our (rearranged) Parent Information Evening. Please see below for our timetables and termly overview.
Do check back here for useful links, updates and sometimes photos too. I hope it will be useful for parents and children alike.
Best wishes,
Mrs Heseltine :-)
Maths - telling the time
We have been doing a lot lately with time problem solving in Class III. Telling the time and using it in everyday situations is such an important skill and we are all getting more confident. We need to keep practising time telling activities in real life situations, using both digital and analogue clocks and also using durations of time. (Please keep working on this at home to help integrate what they have learned and develop understanding of this important skill!)
Science Day - here are some photos of the houses we designed, built and then we tested them against a flood!
1.12.18.
December already! Where does the time go to?
This week we've had so much fun with our International Day celebrations. All of Class III made a real effort to bring a flavour of the countries they chose, be it with costumes, posters, food, songs, facts, speaking in a different language or sharing experiences. Everyone produced a great piece of writing about the day, remembering to work towards the following targets - full stops and capital letters, capital letters for proper nouns, neatly joined up handwriting and carefully indented paragraphs (without skipping a line). We are also continuing to work to lengthen our sentences by adding extra clauses and give more detail and information - this is a great skill for the future for all the children. As is checking our own work for sense and to spot silly mistakes such as missing words, repetition and spelling errors.
We have also worked hard on alphabetical order in recent days, ordering by second letter and looking up words in the dictionary to reinforce the skills learned.
Well done to all the children who took part in our two musical assemblies this week! Class III certainly contains some talented musicians in the making! Well done to:
Teni - violin
Gurveen - piano
Harvin - piano
Sasha - piano
Andrew - piano
Daniel - piano
who all entertained us with their musical skills. We all look forward to hearing more as they progress in the years to come. We also hope they've inspired others to take up an instrument as well.
Our work on division with remainders has lead us on to the subject of fractions - both vulgar and decimal. For anyone not sure how we work through these, here's an example the children were given before doing their own:
We'll be returning to this topic as with the other 3 of the 4 operations (+, -, x, ÷) throughout Year III and indeed right through upper school as the children learn to apply their computational skills more and more to problem solving situations.
24.11.18
This week we've had a team quiz about what we've been learning about the human body - functions of the organs and the skeleton. We're working on our division skills now, and have learned how to find the remainder in real life division questions. Next stop - vulgar and decimal fractions! Our dictionary skills have been put to the test this week and we've learned to order words in alphabetical order by first and then second letter - we're pretty good!
31.10.18.
Welcome back everybody - I hope you had a lovely relaxing half term break.
Happy Halloween!
The children have made a great start to the term with some super maths and English work completed already. We are now busy working on writing the script for our Class Assembly next Thursday - we look forward to seeing Class III's parents for this event at 9.05am in the hall.
I know you are keen to help your children with their homework and this is much appreciated. I loved reading the wonderful poems the children wrote at home over the holidays - not entirely sure I want to eat any of the 'interesting' combinations of sandwich ingredients if I'm completely honest, but reading them aloud made us all laugh!
I've decided to outline a little more specifically the maths in particular that we will be covering in class in the next few weeks - see below!
Thanks - Mrs Heseltine. ;-)
Maths up until Christmas
Of course we will continue with Mathletics, times tables tests as always as well as Bond maths for homework, work in the Mental Arithmetic books and other maths challenges and activities to stretch the children's thinking.
Class III Poetry Project
Autumn Half Term Homework
The green English Homework Books have a page in about comparing poems.
Children are to choose their favourite 2 poems from the following 5 and do the comparison activity in their books.
The children were asked to write about whether they would have liked to live at Skara Brae - here is what they thought...
Logan - In the summer it is very nice, you can learn to build and I like to build things. Also it sounds fun making tools and making clothes to make it comfortable. When it is sunny it is a beautiful site.
Max - Yes - because it would be fun to run around all the underground passages. I can meet my friends anytime.
Jasmine - The reason that I would like to live in Skara Brae is that I would be free. I would not want to live there because I would have to kill animals.
Charlie - The beds would be so uncomfortable. You have no toys, games and tv.
Henry - If you live in a rocky place and there is a sharp bit you might get hurt. A good reason for living there is you don't have to have money.
Kaleb - We could go down to the beach to play but we wouldn't have school. If I was sick I wouldn't be able to go to the doctor's. The toilets would be a little tricky because there would be no flushers.
Daniel - I would like to live at Skara Brae because I can explore the island, and make tools and ornaments and traps. I could help build the house made out of stone.
Andrew - I would not like to stay there because it is very cold and there was a storm. We have to get animals to eat.
George - I would live there because I would have a pet rabbit. It is an island.
Sasha - You have to wear animal skin. It would be cold. You would not have Pizza Hut. Stone might fall on my head.
Gurveen - I would have loved to stay there because you wouldn't have to use your money and you can learn a lot more because you will learn how to kill animals. The bad thing is that if ants and flies get into your house they might bite you when you are sleeping.
Zaheer - I do not want to live on Skara Brae because it is damp.
Aaron - I would love to live in Skara Brae. I have been there before and I loved it. I would live with other people and other children. I wonder how they made Skara Brae. I love it when it is damp and it would be cool to live by the beach.
Teni - I like Skara Bae because there is a toilet and there is a cool hot fire pit but the bad points are there is no tv and no games. Also there are stone beds which I don't like.
We had a fantastic day learning about Bloodhound - the 1,000 mph jet and rocket powered car - see below for a little of what it was all about!
3.10.18.
In the last few days we have been looking at instruction texts - how to play charades, make chocolate sauce, make a jam sandwich and more to come!
In science we have been learning about the skeletons of vertebrates - endoskeletons and exoskeletons.
We've been learning to measure accurately with a ruler this week - the class have done especially well at this, even to the nearest millimetre, so well done everybody.
Our class story - "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" is getting exciting (Edmund has just arrived at the White Witch's house).
We are busy creating some electronic artwork based on the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh - the children may like to explore more of his paintings which Mrs Heseltine saw at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam - here is the link...
https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/collection-highlights
25.9.18.
Things we have been doing lately...
Science - We did an experiment with bubbles in a tall plastic beaker so they could learn how to record experiments in their books. After thinking about what a scientist is, we learned about two of them - Mary Anning and Marie Curie. I wonder what they can remember?
We have now begun to learn about vertebrates and invertebrates, leading on to more work about bones later on.
Art - We've started our multi media paintings / collages about a dream.
French - so far we have focused on numbers to 10, 20 and 50. We played number bingo!
R.E. - We've been learning about why the Bible is important to Christains and where people might also turn for guidance in daily life.
PHSEE - Our project is on Choices of different kinds.
25.9.18.
MATHLETICS
Everybody in Class III is going Mathletics crazy! I'm so delighted to hear how enthusiastically the class have set about doing their maths homework! Well done to you all for making a start. A couple of parents have asked me about the Live Mathletics option -
LIVE MATHLETICS
At Level 1 this is a fun way of improving number bonds until they are super speedy and totally secure in the brain. Easy sums like 2+5 but they still need to know them off by heart (like times tables answers)
Level 2 had addition and subtraction to 20, and
Level 3 you can try out harder sums ( up to 100 with 3 numbers to add together sometimes), also times tables mixed in and some missing number questions and subtraction.
I've just tried playing someone (apparently in Mexico!) at level 4 and it had lots of times tables and some harder subtractions below 100 so that might be a good one for those who enjoy a challenge. Remember you have to think fast in live Mathletics... if you snooze, you lose!
THE MAIN MATHLETICS ACTIVITIES ARE SET BY ME
I will set 5 main activities on Mathletics to begin with (this may change as we get further into it!) and these should appear on a bar each that tells you what kind of maths it is that's involved. Some will be quick and easier and some will take a little more thought and time. I will try and match them to things we have covered so far in class, but may throw a few other tings in from time to time.
Children - please try your best - if your score isn't quite enough I will reset that activity another time for you when I think you are ready to try it again. Remember you can use the question mark facility to ask Mathletics to show you how to work the questions out. This means you can help yourself to learn! If it's really too hard for you and you need lots of help, let me know (especially if you score 10 out of 10 with a lot of help) so I can reset it another time for you to try by yourself or with less help. If I see you got 10 out of 10 I won't know that you found it too hard.
17.9.18.
Well done to every single member of Class III - you have all settled in extremely well to the new school year... now you are in the Upper School! I can't believe how much you have all grown up and developed since I taught you just over a year ago!
A very warm welcome to Andrew who joined us at the beginning of term and is making lots of new friends and settling in really well.
So far we've been busy learning to write letters, working on the number system and place value, learning about cave art and how historians find out what happened in prehistoric times before written records. We had fun up in the orchard looking through the contents of the class dustbin to find out what might have happened in the (more recent) past!