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!