Friday 28th June 2024
What a busy time we have had in year 3 as we pass the mid-point of our final half term of the year!
We have enjoyed creating user manuals for robots that we invented in English, giving instructions on how to service and clean our robots, inspired by the lovely animation ‘Girl and Robot’. We are continuing to read ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ by Cressida Cowell together, and we are particularly enjoying the drama activities that we are able to do together. We have recently been tackling how to tell the time in maths; any extra practice we could do at home would be much appreciated as it can be so tricky!
In our last newsletter at the end of May, we had just set up our sunflower experiment. Here are the results from one of the groups in the class, with the overcrowded sunflowers finding it harder to grow. Hopefully they will fare better now that the children have re-planted the sunflowers outdoors with Mr Hodgson! We have also been looking at seed dispersal as we finish our plants unit, and enjoyed making and investigating model sycamore seeds.
We feel very proud of our Lego League Year 3 team, who will have a special trip soon to the Lego League festival where they will present the models they have worked on with Mr Bailey. As a class, we are also enjoying learning to use the software Canva to create professional looking magazine pages.
Year 3 respond so brilliantly to visitors and are always polite, engaged and inquisitive. Two recent examples have been chatting to John from Durham University about Ancient Egypt and also meeting Mrs Dunn from the local council who helped the children learn about democracy in action.
Friday 24th May 2024
It is hard to believe that we have already arrived at that final week of this half term, and that the children are now about to enter the final stage of year 3! Time has flown!
In English, we have been busy writing some excellent descriptive paragraphs based on our focus book, Leon and the Place Between. It has really sparked our imagination and we have used some fantastic language. Earlier in the half term, we used drama techniques to help us come up with ideas for two-way dialogues in our narratives. We have worked so hard to use speech marks correctly in our writing as well.
We have returned to fractions in maths and have been building on and extending our knowledge brilliantly.
Our new science topic has got off to a good start, learning all about plants. We spent last Thursday setting up an experiment to see whether sunflower growth would be affected by how many seeds were planted in each pot, and we can already see the sunflower plants starting to grow and look forward to measuring them each week to observe what happens over time.
In computing, we have developed our use of Scratch to design drawing programs and we will be able to finish these off (and hopefully share them) just after half term. It always amazes Mrs Richardson the way lots of the children expand on the code we have learnt about and add to it to put their own spin on the programs we design.
Along similar lines, we had a special DT day with Mr Bailey on Thursday this week which crossed over with our computing work, programming Micro:Bit controllers to create road safety focussed wearable devices and designing end products.
Along with finishing our geography, RE and music topics off, this has certainly been a very busy half term! Enjoy the week’s break!
We have continued to work really hard in Year 3 over the last two weeks.
We have written and ‘published’ our newspaper reports about ‘The Attack’ on the Abominables from our focus text. This week, we have started to explore the wonderfully illustrated book, ‘Leon and the Place Between’.
In maths we have been practising the formal column methods for subtraction, addition, multiplication and division.
In geography last week we enjoyed some fieldwork that explored our local area. We looked for human and physical features of the area, and discussed why they were situated where they were. This week we were also very keen to compare our local area with a map of the same area 100 years ago. We looked at features that still exist, those that we don’t have any more and new features that have been added to the area.
We have also been enjoying PE where we are focusing on learning the skills for rounders. Last week we learnt about underarm throwing which we used in a mini game. This week, our focus was on the technique for overarm throwing and we were trying to be as accurate as possible.
We have recently completed a unit of work in science all about light and were able to use some really precise scientific vocabulary brilliantly! One of the practical activities we did was to make shadow puppets from different types of material, to see what difference it made to the shadow when we used a translucent material, for example. We are about to start a new unit of work all about plants, and we will discover who in the class is more green-fingered than Mrs Richardson (quite possibly everyone!)
Computing has seen us return to the programming environment of Scratch, and we are continuing to look at sequencing in our coding work. We are aiming to create drawing programs and are excited to see the results!