Year 3 weekly news 27.1.23

This week in Year 3 we have been artists, swimmers and fitness experts!

In our English lessons this week, we have learnt some more of our example mystery text and started to think about planning our own story for next week. We have investigated what happens in each paragraph, thought about how the main character feels at each part of the story and word choices the author used to make the text mysterious. Our spag focus was fronted adverbials, a or an and we created more super sentences by adding adjectives and adverbs into boring sentences to make them more exciting.

In spellings we investigated words with the c sound spelt with ch. We also added the suffixes -s, -ry, -ed and -ing to root words, remembering our rule of dropping the e before adding -ing or -ed.

Our maths lessons this week saw us continuing on with the multiplication and division unit of work, focusing in on multiplying 2 digit numbers by 1 digit numbers. We first partitioned the two digit number into tens and ones using a part whole model and worked out our calculations. We found this much easier to work out the answer as we could use our times table knowledge. With practise, you found this easier and easier as the week progressed and were able to talk to your partner and the class about each small step to find the answer. We also moved on to telling the time in five minute intervals. We looked at how the minute (big) hand works and that we count up in 5’s when it’s past the hour and back down when it’s to the next hour. We matched up pictures of clock faces with the correct written time. Great maths work Y3.

In our science lesson this week, we have been finding out about the sun, what the Ancient Egyptians thought of the sun and what we know about it now as well as learning about day and night.We found out that the Ancient Egyptians believed the sun was a God called Ra, who travelled through the sky during the day. We discussed that we now know that it isn’t the sun that moves but the Earth that rotates on its axis, taking 24 hours to complete a full turn. It is day when we’re facing the sun and night when we face away from the sun. We found out that the day starts at dawn and becomes dusk as the sun is setting. We then drew an Egyptian scene during the day and the same scene at night, adding watercolour to both to show what would be visible at night (stars and moon) whereas we can see everything during the day.

In history we found out more about the Ancient Egyptians. We watched a video about life in Egypt and thought about how we have found information about that time e.g. artefacts, hieroglyphics, tombs. We created a mind map of all the information we know, from building pyramids to astronomy, inventing irrigation and even making wine!

In our art lesson this week, we recapped colour mixing from our Y1 lessons as it was a long time ago! We learnt a song to remind us and then experimented ourselves. We talked about the three primary colours and worked out what happened when we mixed them. Next week we are going to use these skills to create our own colours to design and draw our own Egyptian headdresses.

In music we finished the final part of making our sistrum instrument! Thank you to the parents who donated their spare buttons to help us out. We added the buttons to our instrument, as well as two different sized metal washers and a gold bell. We can’t wait to play our sistrums next week.

Tuesday saw our Olympic swimmer join us for our sponsored fitness activities. Thank you for all your sponsorships. It was so much fun! You all joined in with all of the activities, and cheered on your friends once you had finished. Wow you were loud! It made for a great atmosphere and there were smiles all round. Mr Dale is now sorting all of the donations and bracelets etc will be with us soon to hand out.

In our computing lesson, we continued to make our own websites all about the Egyptians. We have added some information now and are ready to add photos next week after some technical difficulties with uploads this week! They are looking great already and I can’t wait to see them finished.

This week’s My Happy Mind lesson helped us to think about gratitude and appreciation and we continued to talk about the phrase ‘attitude of gratitude’. We thought about what experiences we are grateful for this week and we thought about our swimming lessons. We started by making sure we said ‘hello’ to our lovely bus driver and thanking him as we left the coach too. We definitely made him smile! We also focused on our happy breathing, I’m sure some of you were nearly asleep you were that relaxed!

Talking of our trip to the swimming baths, wow! You were all fantastic and were keen to get in the water after our assessment week last week. You spent the whole lesson in the water and it was so lovely to see you all confident, happy and having fun. Mrs Whittingham and I were so proud of you all – we all can’t wait for next week!

Have a lovely weekend and we will see you on Monday.

Miss McCurrie and Mrs Jenkins