Merry Christmas Year 3!

Merry Christmas to year 3! We have had a very busy and Christmassy week this week. I was unable to put news on last week as the we had issues with the website so I will share this week and last week in this post!

In maths, last week we started our week with some maths assessments to show off all that you have learnt since September and you worked so hard. You remembered strategies, like column methods to help you work out addition and subtraction and your quick recall of times tables was impressive too. All that TT Rock Stars playing is definitely paying off! This week in maths, we have played times table rock star games, battled each other and tried to improve our times and scores. We have also used addition and subtraction knowledge to complete Christmas 'crack the code' problems and played games including multiplication facts. It was also so great to see lots of you choosing the maths activities to complete once you had finished study work too.

In English this week we have spent the time working on our handwriting and spellings and then using our best handwriting to write up our best pieces for study work. You wrote about David Hockney and his life too. The difference in your handwriting is amazing since September and I can't wait to see how you continue with this in spring term.

In RE, we read a few different nativity stories and compared the different versions. We used props and dressed up as different parts of the nativity stories to help us remember the story and compare the versions. We then thought about why some of the stories were different too.

Can everything make a shadow? This was a key question within our Science lessons this week. We explored how shadows are formed with an opaque, translucent and transparent object. We then investigated what would happen is the light source was moved further away from the object. We recorded our results and took measurements in centimetres. Our puppet theatres were then treated to a make over! We created scenes from the nativity to illuminate using torches, and what a great job you did!

Last week we celebrated our term with a theme day which we were really looking forward to. Pirate McCurrie was your teacher for the day and our class was full of sea creatures, cheeky pirates, deep sea divers and mermaids! We made pirate maps to find the treasure, staining them with tea first to make them look old and then adding the detail. You were really proud of these and asked for them to go in your study work books – I agree! We also enjoyed some sea themed snacks throughout the day and learnt some sea shanties and tongue twisters which were lots of fun! We learnt how to draw sea turtles and then watched a short clip of them to discover the colours we needed to paint them. We then painted them in our sketch books. Thank you to mum's and dads for helping with the fantastic costumes and providing snacks for the day. We had a brilliant day full of lots of fun!

This week in our art lessons we recapped adding white to colours to make them lighter and adding black to colours to make them darker to create the night sky the night baby Jesus was born. We then linked our shadow learning in science and made a silhouette nativity scene. We also finished off our David Hockney inspired swimming pool pictures, where we added the people swimming. We worked on portrait features for the face and drawing body parts. I'm sure you'll be as impressed as I was! These will form part of our study work books too.

And then this leaves us with all of our Christmas activities this week! This week was full of celebrations for Christmas!
On Wednesday we enjoyed a Christmas lunch this year in the classroom but it didn't make it any less special. We turned the lights down to see the Christmas fairy lights and enjoyed Christmas crackers, some Christmas music and a film and of course, the tasty Christmas lunch!
Thursday brought panto and party day! In the morning we enjoyed party games like corners, musical bumps, pass the parcel and the afternoon included lots of laughs for the panto and we enjoyed our sweets and crisps too!

We finished the week by watching other year groups (and our own) retellings of the nativity story which we loved! We hope you enjoyed our nativity story too.

Have a lovely Christmas, stay safe and enjoy your family time. See you next year!
Miss McCurrie