A special visitor!

This week the children have had a very special visitor spend the morning with them to help launch their topic of Extreme Survival. Mark Wood, a real life explorer, came to share his adventure stories with the children! Mark was a pupil at Stivichall Primary School and since that time has had the most amazing life. An established polar explorer and adventurer, in 2011/2012 Mark attempted to ski solo and unsupported to the North and South Geographic Poles in an incredible feat of physical and mental endurance. He can also count climbing Mount Everest, cycling across the USA and New Zealand, Alaskan dog sledding, heading up a BBC Top Gear expedition and supporting educational projects world wide on his list of achievements. What an amazing man! 

The children were mesmerised by his stories, videos and photographs of his expeditions but were particularly fascinated by the real Polar Bear tooth he brought along! If you would like to read more about Mark and his adventures then please visit his website http://www.markwoodexplorer.com. The children will be following up his visit with activities and work relating to his visit and life in polar regions.

In Science the children have been investigating magnets. They have learned how magnets were discovered and the types of things they are used for, especially toys! The children then had the chance to design a toy or game of their own that used magnets to make it exciting. We had some wonderful creations! We also investigated how magnets help people find their way around by being inside compasses. The children then made their own compass using a paper clip, a piece of cork and some water.

During Christmas Art Morning the class split into two and half of the children visited class 1S while the other half of 1S came into 3P. The role of the children in 3P was to help the younger ones with their christmas craft activity. We began by making peppermint creams which involved masses of icing sugar! It definitely looked like it had been snowing in the classroom that day! After break we made christmas gift boxes to put our peppermint creams in along with a paper hat and a joke. The children did find making the boxes a bit tricky but I was extremely impressed with how determined they were to get it right. Well done year one and three!

In English the children have been learning about the importance of instructions and how to write them well. We began by looking at lots of different types of instructions and the types of features they all contain such as bullet points, numbering, imperative (bossy) verbs and time connectives. We then looked at how instructions can be interactive and watched a video on how to make a paper hat.

The children then had a go at making the paper hat but with a twist. In pairs one had to do the paper folding and the other held a microphone to be the presenter. We watched a couple of the videos at the end of the lesson and I was super impressed with the confident  presenting skills and effective language the children used! Blue Peter presenters have class 3P children ready to step into their shoes!

E-safety

As your children grow older are able to access the internet and mobile devices more independently it is important they know how to stay safe online. In the week leading up to half term the children took part in an e-safety lesson and were introduced to the phrase ‘Zip it, Block it, Flag it’

Using the actions to go with the words, the children learned that it is important to keep your personal information private and never to share details such as their name, address, school or location online. They discovered what to do if they ever received any nasty messages or information via a website or mobile phone and how important it was to tell a trusted adult if anything like that ever happened. An animation developed by the government website CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection) was shown which highlighted this information in a child friendly way. The children had an opportunity to think about what they would do in certain situations by working in groups to discuss set questions (see http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/themes/stayingsafeonline/whatwouldyoudoif.htm).

This information will be revisited regularly during year three to ensure children can keep themselves safe online. Please talk to your children about what they have learned so that they can apply this knowledge to the wider context of the outside world.

It is also worth visiting the partnership websites of CEOP and 'Think You Know' to find helpful guidance and tips on how to keep your children safe.

Week Ten

Welcome back and I hope you all had a wonderful half term!

This week the children have come back into school full of energy and smiles which is good to see!

English

In English the children started off by writing a recount of what they have been getting up to in the half term holiday. It sounds like lots of sleepovers and meeting up with school friends took place which is nice to hear. With firework night happening this week the children moved onto writing poetry, thinking about the sights, sounds and excitement that they might expect to experience. A lot of work was spent looking at poetry and examining its contents such as similes, alliteration, rhyming words, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. The children were then encouraged to use this information to write a draft poem, then revise, edit and improve it ready to use for their final piece. The finished poems were written up in the form of a shape or concrete poem.
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A Shape Poem is a type of poetry that describes an object and is shaped the same as the object the poem is describing.

The finished poems have been mounted and displayed on a line across the classroom if you want to read them. 

A visit from the Fire Brigade, who gave an educational talk to the children, also helped to reinforce the importance of staying safe on bonfire night.

Maths

In maths the children have been learning about multiplication and division. 

Multiplication

The children have moved onto the grid method of multiplication which partitions the numbers into hundreds, tens and units making them easier to multiply separately. The following link is an interactive activity which shows you how to use this method and is something the children could use at home too.

http://www.iboard.co.uk/iwb/Grid-Method-547

Division

Most children have been learning to divide numbers using a blank number line.
Some children have been using the ‘Bus Stop’ method for division as shown in this link

http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks2/maths/school_booster/busstopdivision.html

RE

In RE the children have been learning about the various parts of a Mosque in preparation for a visit to a Mosque next Tuesday. The children were given an extra challenge to build a 3D Mosque from paper using a template. It was quite a fiddly task and I was very impressed with the determination of the children to get it right and finish it. You can see this work in progress and the finished Mosques below.

Science
Our rocks topic is now drawing to a close but our final lesson was to explore the top layer of our planet which contains a lot of soil. The children were first asked to brainstorm in groups what they know or want to know about soil.

This was followed by the children investigating a bowl of soil they collected from outside the classroom. You will be amazed what we found in just a few small samples! Mini centipedes, red ants, leaves, twigs, worms, rocks, water, grass and snail shells! (sorry, I was so engrossed in this part I forgot to take photographs!) The children then had to use this information to design their own ‘soil cocktail’ and draw and label what they might find in one! We had some really creative designs. Finally the children filled in a chart showing exactly what they found in their sample of soil.

Next week

The children will be having a focus week in English on punctuation and grammar focusing on writing extended sentences, direct speech and written tense.

In maths the children will be learning about 2D shapes, irregular and regular.

Pushes, pulls and forces will be investigated in Science.

PE will be netball and gymnastics.

Humanities starts on our new topic of Extreme Survival.