week four!

This week lots of exciting things have been happening in year three.

In English the children have been continuing to investigate and write about stories with familiar settings. To stimulate their imagination the popular iPad game Temple Run was used as a ‘hook’. We discussed how the game starts at what appears to be the end of a story. A man is running from a temple with a golden Idol under his arm and there are several gorilla type animals chasing him. A pursuit follows along the walls of the temple that seems to cover miles of rainforest type jungle.

To begin the children were given a short amount of time to play the game before using another app called Skitch to record ideas about the story. This was followed by the children writing lots of adjectives in their drafting books to describe the setting, speed, emotions and description of the character. In ICT these words were put into a program called Wordle to produce a word mind cloud. Further lessons focused on investigating the jungle setting and a detailed description of the main character Guy Dangerous. Next week the children will be using all their gathered information to help them write their Temple Run story!

 

In maths the children have been learning how to add and subtract multiples of 1’s, 10’s and 100’s on a number line.  On Thursday we were very lucky to be able to spend the afternoon in the hall with the Happy Puzzle Company. The main focus of the afternoon was to encourage independent thinking alongside team working, teaching children not give up on something if they cannot do it first time around. Put into groups of 7-8, the children were given challenges and puzzles but could not move onto the next challenge until they had completed the first! It was very interesting to see the team dynamics that took place during this time!

In art the children have been looking at early cave paintings and the meanings behind them. They have sketched some ideas for their own cave painting in their artists sketch books and we are hoping to continue the theme next week using pastels and chalks.

In science the children have been continuing to look at rocks. They have been using magnifying glasses to observe rocks closely and fill in a scientific table about their properties.

In Forest Schools the children began the session by threading their clay and wooden beads on to string to make a necklace. They then organised themselves into groups of 5 to begin their den building challenge. Sarah, the Forest School leader, brought in long lengths of willow tree branches for the children to use as building material. With a very brief introduction the children were then sent off in their groups to build dens! Next week the dens may be tested with water to see if they are waterproof. it is advisable to send your children with waterproof clothing for this session!

Week three!

It has been another busy week in class 3P!

In English the children have been learning how to use their senses to write about a familiar setting. To help them we went into The Dell, next to the playground, to see what we would see, hear, touch, smell and taste. This helped the children write some very creative descriptions!

To enhance their writing the children were introduced to similes. They heard a poem call ‘My Monster’ by Lindsay Carmichael and then worked as a class to create their own poem.

Class 3P’s Monster

He is as black as deep space

His ears are as pointy as a knife

He is as bad as a devil with one eye

He is as hairy as a woolly Mammoth

Our Monster has teeth as yellow as the sun

And his legs are as long as lamp posts.

The children then had just 5 minutes to draw the class monster! 

In Maths the children have been learning about the symbols < and > using the visualisation of Charlie the Crocodile’s mouth to help them remember which way the symbol should face. Ask them, hopefully they will remember!

They have also been learning about partitioning three digit numbers in different ways e.g. 

346

300 + 40 + 6

200 + 120 + 26

300 + 30 + 16

To help your child you can follow the link below and look at section L, Place Values.

http://uk.ixl.com/math/year-3

In Art the children have been continuing to explore self portraits but this time using a method of printing with ink. Using a piece of polystyrene they carefully pressed out an image of their face using a photograph to help. Once done, an inking roller was used to cover the polystyrene with ink and it was then pressed onto paper. The resulting image showed a print of their face! All these pieces of art are hung across the classroom if you want to pop in and see them. 

In Science the children have continued to learn about rocks and how our whole planet is made of different types. They have had an opportunity to handle lots of different types of rock and use magnifying glasses to observe them closely. I have really been impressed by the amount of rocks children have brought in from home. This has made a lovely interactive display in the classroom where the children can pick up and observe rocks at any time! Please continue to send them in :)

Finally in Forest School the children continued along our theme of The Stone Age and had a go at making jewellery beads from air dry clay and elder branches. To cut the elder branches they were shown how to safely use garden loppers. The children also used an identification sheet to  find the names of various bugs, plants, leaves and berries. One group managed to locate a frog so this caused a lot of excitement! I would also like to mention how impressed I am with the behaviour of the children while they are learning outside the classroom. They are fantastic!

APP of the Week!

Just thought I would mention an App that my own children are using at home to help them learn their times tables. Its called ‘Squeebles Times Tables 2’. Children get challenges on times tables of their choice and for each set of questions they can earn bubble stones, stars and characters. The more times table challenges they get right, the more squabble characters they earn and the better score they can get in the game. Helping your children to learn their times tables will really improve their maths!

Below is a quick video demonstrating how it works.

Getting back into the swing of things!

The children seem to be settling in well and getting used to the new routines and their new classmates.

In maths we have been learning about Place Value and understanding how numbers can be partitioned into hundreds, tens and units. They have been learning that the place of a number determines how many hundreds, tens and units it contains. The following website contains some online maths activities that you can use with your child to help them embed their learning.

http://uk.ixl.com/math/year-3

Please scroll down to section L, ‘Place Values’.

In science the children watched a video showing amazing rock formations around the world and have taken great delight in seeing rocks shaped like chickens and question marks! This led us on a hunt around the school to search for different kinds of rocks and to think about whether they were man-made or natural and what they were used for. The children were asked these questions about rocks in a carousel around the classroom:

• Where do rocks come from?
• What are rocks used for?
• What are rocks made of?
• How many different types of rocks are there?
• Why are some rocks big and some are small?

Joshua wanted to add another question,

• What kind of things do we make out of rocks?

So this was added to the carousel too. We had lots of different answers from the children, they all seem very knowledgable!

In English we have been learning all about the author Anthony Browne. The children discovered there are lots of ‘secret’ pictures within pictures of Anthony Browne books and took great delight in finding them. Following on from reading Browne’s book ‘Gorilla’, the children brought in a favourite toy of their own to write what sort of adventure they would like it to take them on.

In PE the children have been practising basketball skills such as dribbling with the ball, passing the ball from one hand to another whilst dribbling and bounce passing to a partner. In dance they have been thinking about five basic dance movements: Jump, turn, travel, stillness and gesture. They related these movements to early stone age man and how they move while hunting or being hunted, gathering fruit or eating prey! Even though some boys were not keen when they discovered they were learning dance in PE, by the end of the lesson they couldn’t wait to show their dance routines to the rest of the class and they were fantastic!

In Art we have been drawing self portraits. I have tried to express to the children that their art can take its own style and does not have to be perfect! We looked at the self portraits of famous artists to understand that there are many ways of creating an image. Some artists use abstract methods, other realism and others even used fruit shapes to create a face! I showed children how they could use a ruler to help them get the proportions of the face even but they could use freehand methods if they preferred. The children listened to a story called ‘Ish’ and how in it a little boy called Ramone stopped drawing because his brother laughed at his art. We thought about what questions we would ask Ramone in our ‘Philosophy for Children’ time. 

School Council

 I would like to say a big WELL DONE to all the children who wrote letters to apply to represent class 3P on the school council. The children read their letters out to the class and a ‘blind vote’ was taken to decide the winner. Congratulations to Abigail O’Keefe who won the vote. I think her mission to ask for another tuck shop may have been the deciding factor! 

Caught Reading!

Forest Schools!