Last week was assessment week, and all of the year 3 staff are very proud of how well the class focused and concentrated to show what they are able to do at this point of the year – over halfway through year 3! On Friday, we were able to relax a bit and had a nice time celebrating Red Nose Day, with an obstacle course designed and run by our school councillors.
In English, we have been doing a great job planning and writing ‘The True Story of Red Riding Hood’, focusing on showing the perspective of the wolf as he tells his side of the story. We think we have been quite convincing! In maths, we have been looking in detail at the 2, 4 and 8 times tables, and looking at the links between these three tables as well as different patterns that we can find in the numbers. Along with our daily times tables practice, we are getting really fluent in our knowledge!
One activity that many of us have enjoyed recently has been observational drawing in art. We carefully copied the different shapes in the can designs and felt proud of how accurate our drawings were.
Along with all this, we have been designing branching databases in computing, learning more about Ancient Egypt in history lessons, naming musical instruments in French, practising team game skills in PE and we have even started having a little look at some of the songs that we will perform in our musical show in May!
Last Tuesday was such a busy day as most of us enjoyed our trip to the Great North Museum in Newcastle to kick off our Egyptians topic for this half term, and Ava and Oscar got the opportunity to travel to London with the School Council to visit the Houses of Parliament! Then before we knew it, it was World Book Day. We embraced the challenge to dress up wonderfully, and really enjoyed our story sharing time in the library. We enjoyed creating comic strips based on the theme ‘The Magic of Reading’ in the afternoon.
On Wednesday morning, we had a visit from a special theatre group who performed ‘Wind in the Willows’ and Isaac was invited to join in and be part of the play!
We have somehow managed to fit some other lessons in along with all these special occasions! In English, we are enjoying getting into the mindset of the wolf character in different fairy tales, using drama to explore different characters’ perspectives. In maths, we have just started a unit of work focusing on the 2, 4 and 8 times tables and the relationships between them. Some of us are really impressing Mrs Morris and Mrs Richardson with the fluency of our times tables recall! In French we have started learning the names of some musical instruments, and have been working extremely hard on learning proper French pronunciation, which isn’t always easy!
In English, we have enjoyed working towards some written work on the Iron Man, as we did so well reading through the book and discussing it a few weeks ago. We have had fun creating radio adverts where the Iron Man is for hire – imagine all thejobs that he could do around the home!
In maths, we are flying with column addition, and have been really good at explaining our methods out loud as well.
Last week finally saw the construction of our long-awaited castles in the DT lesson! We managed to include a lot of the features that we had discussed. What do you think?
We moved onto discussing fossils in our science topic of ‘rocks and soils’ last week, and impressed Mrs Richardson with some of the information we could remember from year 1, particularly about the famous early palaeontologist Mary Anning. We had fun making pretend ‘mould’ fossils where coffee, flour, salt and water took were used in place of sediment, sand and seawater, and we imaginedhow the ancient creatures left an imprint in the rock as it hardened. Can you spot the traces of tiny dinosaurs in any of these ‘fossils’?
We are getting on brilliantly using Scratch for programming in computing, and hopefully we can share some of our musical sequences soon, as well as a performance of our song this half term, ‘Three Little Birds’.
It is hard to believe that we are already four weeks into this half term! What a busy time we have had. In our reading lessons, we have loved exploring ‘The Iron Man’ and we have just started ‘The Abominables’. In English, we had our first attempt at writing poetry in year 3. The poems were based on Roald Dahl’s, ‘The Dentist and the Crocodile’. It was a challenge making the lines rhyme but we worked hard and were proud of our results!
In maths, we have been securing our mental methods for addition and subtraction, before we move on to more formal written methods after the February half term break. We have embraced using different kinds of equipment and number lines to help us, as well as explaining our reasoning out loud in lessons.
We are enjoying our new science topic, ‘Rocks and Soils’ – especially getting to grips with our tricky key vocabulary: igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. Last week we had a special science lesson where we joined hundreds of schools for a nation-wide talk from real scientists on small and large units in science and engineering. We knew about cm and km but had never heard of a yottametre or a zeptometre before!
In computing, we have started learning how to use the coding language of Scratch and will work towards creating digital musical sequences, which will tie in nicely with our music lessons where we are doing a fantastic job playing and improvising on our glockenspiels, and will soon start to read music notation.
We’ve been enjoying learning about castle structures in Design Technology. We have done our own designs and can’t wait to get building! We also used the Commando Joe equipment to work as a team to build castles that included all of the key features.