Year 3 have started their new topic of ‘Active Planet’ by researching facts and creating fabulous eBooks and Morfobooth videos to demonstrate what they have been learning about.  We also looked at the Pixar short ‘Lava’ on YouTube and wrote a short retell of the story using sentence openers such as ‘After a while’ and ‘During this time’.  We can’t wait to learn about the properties of rocks and to carry out experiments such as dissolving parts of rocks in vinegar!

Mrs Toms

Year 3 enjoyed making a Skara Brae (remaining Stone Age settlements in Orkney, Scotland) settlements with their shoe boxes.  We discussed the foundations and how the land is above the settlements and why only the stone remains.  The children discussed the use of animal skins for purposes such as blankets and the importance of a fire pit in the centre of the room.  The children then went outside to work in groups using natural materials to recreate the settlements

Mrs Toms

Year 3 have been learning all about the tricky concept of time! As you can imagine, it is very difficult and so the children need as many opportunities as possible to tell the time both in school and at home.  We are focusing on the 12 hour clock and how to read the time to the nearest 5 minutes e.g. 25 minutes past twelve.

Mrs Toms  

Year 3 children are now moving onto learning about the ‘ou’ making the ‘uh’ sound as part of their spelling and grammar lessons.

At the end of this half term the children will be tested through dictation to see if they have remembered this spelling rule! Children love their spelling and grammar lessons that take place daily- on Tuesday we played ‘ou’ dominoes! 

Some examples of words we are learning are;

touch
young
double
trouble 
country
cousin 
couple
courage
flourish 
nourish
rough
tough
enough 

Some parents find that posting the words around the house helps children to recognise them daily! You could also encourage your child to play “teachers” at home and let them show you how to write the word within a sentence. 

We are also working on learning the definitions and synonyms (other words with the same meaning). They are really enjoying this game of finding definitions! 

Please keep going with the spellings at home. Large numbers of children have now completed all first 300 words and are working solely on the year 3 words! If you have been given year 1&2 words to learn with your child, please treat this as the priority before year 3 words. 

Thanks! 

Mrs Toms

Year 3 would like to tell you about our Music lessons this term !

First we composed music in the style of the Aztecs.  We had fun using natural and man-made materials in the school grounds to create sound and rhythm.

After that our focus has been Animal Magic. We have added mimed greetings and percussion accompaniments to the Tortoise song. Then we made animal hasthas (hand shapes) using hand movements for different animals. At the moment we are composing our own music to represent an animal moving. We are going to use graphic notation to record our music.

Here are some photographs of our music lessons.

Mrs Taylor

A big thank you to all parents and carers who contributed so generously to our cake and biscuit decorating day. We had such a lovely time decorating the biscuits with fancy designs  and making them as attractive as possible. We think even Mr Wonka himself would have been pleased with our designs! We managed to raise an excellent £69.50 from the sale and we will be using this money towards our trip to the aquarium in the second half of the autumn term. You will receive more information about this in the coming days. 

A big thank you to everybody who came in with money and bought cakes and biscuits for siblings and family members too. We hope you enjoyed them as much as we enjoyed creating them! 

Another thank you to Josh, Ryan, Gloria and Alfie and many others who were our shopkeepers for the day and worked so hard to give everybody the right change they needed. You are stars! 

Last week Beech Class had a lovely morning at Pizza Express making Pizzas.

Once they had washed their hands and put on the aprons and hats, the children were shown all of the ingredients needed to make a pizza base including milk, flour, oil, salt, yeast and water. They then shaped their pizza dough into the baking trays then laid the tomato sauce on top. After sprinkling cheese on top of the tomato sauce the pizzas were put into the oven.

As it was a beautiful sunny day, the children enjoyed eating the pizzas in the park.

We had great fun this morning making a drink for Geoffrey the Giraffe (we have been reading his story in our Literacy lessons).

First we got a cup and put our name on it. Then we went outside and looked for different ingredients to put into the drink because Geoffrey doesn’t like water. We found grass, leaves, flowers, berries and sticks. Mrs O’Brien brought  some herbs into school and we added a pinch of these too.  We added some water and then stirred it with the stirring stick!

Look at our lovely cocktails….