Year 3 news! 14.5.21

In Year 3 this week, we have been busy bees filling our brains with maths, art, PE, science, history and learning about our feelings as part of mental health week!

As part of Mental Health week this week, we learnt all about what mental health is, why it is important to look after it and what we can do to help ourselves and each other. We introduced a feelings chart and we loved it so much it's here to stay now in our classroom as a permanent feature. We discussed each feeling and discussed when we might have felt it e.g. proud, confident, nervous, hopeful and then, if we chose to, recorded our feelings at different parts of the day. It was great to see so many of you joining in and supporting each other too. We then went on to make HAPPY posters, with 'happy' as the acrostic poem. We looked at the words help, appreciate, practise, planet plan and yourself to make our poems and then coloured them in and added pictures.

In maths this week, we started our lessons with some recapping starter activities. You asked for recap work on shape and time so that's what we did. It is so lovely to see you leading your own learning and how focused you all are on improving your knowledge. We spoke about wearing a watch with a face (not digital) to help you to tell the time and it was fantastic to see so many of you wearing these the very next day. This will help you to tell the time if you keep looking, keep asking and see the hands move at different times. We covered o'clock and half past and you worked really hard with the clocks. We will move onto quarter past and quarter to next week. In our maths lessons, we continued with our fractions unit and we completed the unit! We worked on counting in 1/2s which you found so tricky at the beginning of the lesson and by the end you were all chanting them with such confidence! We moved on to counting in 1/4s too, worked hard developing our knowledge of recognizing whole numbers, fractions and then mixed numbers. We also spent some time looking at applying this knowledge into reasoning problems too. We will continue to include fractions in our starters next week.

In our design and technology lessons this week, we finished our noughts and crosses/three stones project. All that is left to do now is to stick the buttons on but the sewing is complete. We focused on running stitch and back stitch to make our stitch more defined. We learnt about where the Romans played 'three stones' too.

In art, you continued with your mosaic project this time applying your new skills to create a picture of a Roman emperor. You first watercoloured the head of the Roman emperor thinking about skin tone and appropriate colours. Then you worked on the background, choosing two or three colours that complimented each other to make the background stand out. I am already looking forward to seeing the finished article.

In science this week, we learnt all about how rocks are formed. You learnt about three different types of rock, metamorphic rock, igneous rock and sedimentary rock and then became rock detectives to plan your rock experiment. You asked the questions
how hard is the rock?
How absorbent is the rock?
You also thought about what it looks like close up and planned a water and acid (vinegar) test on the rocks ready to be tested next week!

In English this week, we have covered lots of different areas! We learnt all about apostrophes this time for possession so now we know there can be two reasons for apostrophes. Once we had learnt how these work, we had a go at applying them into our sentences. We spent some time practising our next joins and applying this to our writing throughout the week. I was so impressed that the whole class enjoyed using our fancy handwriting pencils on Friday! Well done year 3 team!

In our reading sessions this week, we continued with our rocks and minerals theme and looked at features found in one fiction texts and not in fiction texts. We also had time to work on our fluency when reading by reading aloud our big cat books.

In our RE lesson this week we came to the end of our unit on 'Salvation' and answered the question 'How does Jesus rescue people in the Bible and today?'
We collected a bank of words to use and formed a sentence on our wipe boards, before transferring it in our best handwriting onto a template. We then illustrated the cross by thinking of what 'salvation' would look if it was colours.

In our music lessons, we practised playing our recorders along with the Dragon Song. Some of us felt confident enough to play a solo which was very lovely to see. The whole class play beautifully together, and we are looking forward to performing our piece for you soon.

In our French lesson this week, we learnt some more classroom commands, such as listen and repeat and sit down and stand up. We had lots of fun learning these and we have been adding these phrases in our other lessons too. You had a conversation with your partner asking them what is their name and how are you?

Our Computing lesson saw us adding more detail to our website pages. This time you have changed the font, added pictures and captions and saved your work.

I hope you have had a restful weekend after all that!
Miss McCurrie