Year 3 weekly news

Hope you all had a well earned weekend break after how hard you all worked last week!

In English we continued with the theme of pirates and have been learning all about speech marks. We went on a speech marks hunt from some pages in our class story Oliver and the Seawigs, we looked at conversations and turned them into sentences using speech marks and we have thought about other words to make our writing exciting by not using 'said' all the time.

In maths, we have now nearly finished our addition and subtraction unit. This week we built upon last week's learning of adding and subtracting ones to three digit numbers to this week adding and subtracting tens to three digit numbers. If there weren't enough tens in the number, we learnt to exchange which meant we swapped a 100 for 10 10s and this helped us to work out the answer. We also had a recap lesson on shape and a recap lesson on adding and subtracting using coins too.

In our mindfulness lesson this week we played some calming music and chose to do some colouring. We also made up a very funny class story where we all had one line each to contribute to it. Lots of giggles were had writing it!

In science we built upon last week's learning about light and this week learnt about light sources and investigated how shining a light source (a torch) helped us to see different colours. We asked the question what colours and materials show up best in the dark? We made a dark cave in the classroom and all entered it one by one to investigate which colours we could see. We also painted our shadow puppet show theatres ready for our big shadow puppet performances!

In computing this week, we continued to use stop motion. Last week, we learnt to take photos and create a short video. This week we built upon those skills by looking at how to position the iPads to ensure the video looks like a realistic movement and we also changed the speed to fit our project. We took photos in partner teams of our favourite books to showcase them and then used our pirates from last week to focus on moving characters. We also completed our 'Safe at School' survey using the iPads.

We continued to learn about the artist David Hockney and found out he loved painting water, focusing on the patterns that appear in water when a splash is made or the water is moving. We used oil pastels and learnt that water cannot move through oil so our water colours showed up our white patterns really well, making the water look like it is moving. We learnt this technique is called oil resist and we showed our strong muscles every time we said resist to help us remember the word. We said the oil must be really strong to stop the water going over it. Next week, we will look at putting our portraits of people into action and draw people swimming in the water.

We had some more book reviews in from our fantastic new books in the Y3 reading challenge basket. One of our favourites this week was 'Egyptians Magnified' with a real magnifying glass in the book!

I'm already looking forward to this week together.

Miss McCurrie