Hello,

We hope that you have all had a good week and that you are enjoying the weekend so far.

This week, St. Peters welcomed the children back to school for the beginning of the second spring term. In English, the children have been exploring Rainforest poetry. On Monday, the children were given a ‘mysterious bag of words’ from which to make predictions about the genre, purpose and audience of their next writing outcome: a night time Rainforest poem! As the week progressed, the children were given adjective and verb cards and took part in a ‘shades of meaning’ activity in order to develop their vocabulary banks and to discuss/compare the intensity of particular word choices. The children particularly enjoyed justifying their own choices when deciding how to order their language cards. At the end of the week, Year Three worked in table groups to order the sentences from a WAGOLL poem (What A Good One Looks Like) in order to make a cohesive poetic verse. We were impressed by the children’s annotations of poetic language including alliteration and similes, as well as their explanations for the effect these poetic devices have upon a reader or audience. Well done Year Three!

In Maths, we have been learning about measurements. At the start of the week, we introduced this unit by showing the children a riddle: “You are as wide as you are tall”. The children had a fantastic time taking part in a variety of investigative activities, to explore mm, cm and metres to prove or disprove this hypothesis. Furthermore, Year Three were then able to create their own tests such as ‘Your hand span is half the length between your elbow and fingers’, etc. In particular, the children have used bar models, their knowledge of fractions (e.g. half of a metre is 50cm, 1/10 of a cm is 1mm) as well as measuring equipment when solving a variety of measurement problems. As the week progressed, children were also given challenges including open-ended combination problems and the opportunity to measure with a ‘broken ruler’ to start counting out lengths from a number other than zero. We were delighted to see the children’s use of collaboration and commitment across these tasks.

We hope that you all enjoy the rest of your weekend and look forward to seeing you all at parents evening next week.

Kind regards,

Miss Honeywell, Mrs Stewart and Mrs Sumba

The Challenge: Your challenge today was to make a boat that was strong enough to float on water and hold a heavy weight! You will be choosing which materials to use and designing a boat that can hold as many marbles/weights on board as possible, without sinking…

Adapt your boat design as you go to see if your boat can float and win the ‘heaviest weight’ challenge!

We had a lot of fun designing, making and testing out the boats that we made in response to the challenge posed.  Here are some of the pictures from the day.

Here are another 2 Rainforest projects from the children in Year 3!

On Monday 4th and 11th February 2019, Year 3 visited Staunton Country Park to further enrich their topic curriculum and experience a taste of a tropical Rainforest. The children created a class Rainforest (picture below), discussed the effects of deforestation, explored the plants in the Rainforest and even got to  see and hold some Rainforest creatures! They were very brave indeed! The children all impressed the group leader with their knowledge of the Rainforest and they had all had a lovely day out of class.  Thank you to all the parents who were able to come along and help out.

The children were very excited to not only enjoy the recent snow fall but also to meet an author this week. On Friday afternoon, they got the chance to listen to the Author – Grant Koper – read them a story in the hall with the children from KS1.  They found the book – The day Granny’s knickers blew away – hilariously funny.  Some children purchased their own copy.  His website is www.grantkoper.com should you wish to find out more about this author with your children or purchase any further publications.

We have been looking at equivalent fractions this week in Maths.  We started by looking at equivalent fractions for thirds and fifths.  The children enjoyed creating a fraction wall to help to do this.

In Literacy the children started to write their non-chronological report.  Some of the introductions that the children wrote where very impressive. See below:

“Did you know that the Rainforest is home to an extremely rare Dragon found by a famous hunter Dr John in 2018? You will probably find it in the emergent layer eating fruits and birds. There were 500 but now there are only 200 left because hunters want the diamonds on their bodies.  The name Dragon means ‘fast’ in Greek.’  Noah

“Have you ever seen any such thing as a feathered, scaly, fast Green Griffin? You will usually find it searching for food or nesting in a whole at the bottom of a tree trunk where it is safest from the predators who can’t reach them.  It was first discovered by explorer Dawson who claimed to have seen one picking berries in 1948. But unfortunately, there are only 400 left in the world because of deforestation. It has to stop!” Ava

Topic news – we’ve seen some lovely home learning projects coming into school as well as factfiles all about the Rainforest. Here is an example of a project made by Sophia and her family:

Happy weekend from all of the Year Three team.

This week we have started our Fraction unit in Maths.  We have been investigating fractions on a number line and recognising that tenths arise when you divide a whole number by 10 equal parts.  The children have risen to the challenge and have made a good start.  Can the children look for fractions in their every day home lives and environments?

In Literacy, we have been developing our authors tone of voice by pretending to be a documentary film maker like David Attenborough to describe the rainforest in a factual way.  The children have been using the conjunctions when, because, although and if to write complex sentences.

This week the Year 3 children celebrated Mass with the Year 4 children.  We thank all who were able to attend.

We would like to invite you to drop in to see the children’s work from the Rainforest topic again.  The children really enjoyed sharing their Stone Age work and I know that this topic will be no different.  Date to be confirmed next week.

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

Year 3

Happy New Year to you all from the Year 3 team.  We hope you all had a happy and restful Christmas break!

The children certainly have come back to school keen to begin their next learning journeys.  This term is all about the Rainforests.  We be using this topic in our Literacy and Maths work throughout the term.  Again, we will be inviting parents, carers and family members to come and look through the topic work from the term.

In Literacy, we have been learning about note taking and exploring non – chronological books with the children.  The children have been learning lots of new rainforest facts throughout the week.

In our Maths lesson, we have been consolidating our understanding of the times tables and division facts. We have been thinking about how 4 x 5 can help us to solve 4 x 50.

Spellings have been sent out this week and so we look forward to seeing what the children do next Friday.

Team Three

We are into the final week of school before the Christmas Festivities begin.  The children have not slowed down in their work rate at school though and they were excited to be writing their Scary Stories based on the story ‘the Gorgle.’ We have been very impressed so far.

In Maths we have been learning about right angles and today we were writing Christmas-style words on our pages and then looking for right angles.

Thank you to all the parents who came to have a look at the children’s Topic learning from this half term.  It is wonderful to be able to share the hard work of the children and we know that they were very proud too.  We will be holding another informal evening in the Spring term to share the learning from next term.

Not long to go now! Keep up the hard work.

Team Three

We kicked off STEM day with an assembly in the hall where we saw how Mobile Phones have changed over the last 20-30 years.  We then looked at the engineering involved to create a domino effect involving 50,000dominoes. Then finally we saw how humans can actually walk on custard! The children were buzzing after the assembly and keen to get creating, designing, building and collaborating on the project ahead of them today!

The Sustainable Car

Last week, Year 3 started a project on Sustainability.  We have been focusing on Light pollution so far but today it was time to turn our attention to the problem with pollution.  We talked about alternatives to petrol cars and then the children were presented today’s challenge which was to make a sustainable car to race! The children were using a balloon to power their car, a plastic cup, a bottle, straws, thread and rubber bands.

They adapted their designs as they went to try and get their car moving. Here are some of the pictures.

In Maths this week we have been looking at problem solving with addition.  We have been calculating the amount of carrots Rudolph will have eaten on his Christmas Eve journey. Here is an example of how we were practising ‘regrouping’ when we are calculating.  We use regrouping as a way of changing 10 tens into 1 hundred and 10 ones into 1 ten.  This child used a red pen to show the tens that she would regroup for 1 hundred instead.  The children enjoyed using their regrouping pens to do this!

In English, the children continued to read the book The Gorge.  We started to think about speech between two characters and using role play we were able to improve our speech to ensure that it was moving the story forward – adding information about the story.  The children then use speech punctuation to record the conversations between Finn and Oliver.  Next week, we will begin to write our Spooky stories!

Spellings: This week we will be learning 6 words from the Year 3/4 statutory word list: Calendar, Caught, Centre, Century, Certain, Circle. Suggested activities include: looking up the words in the dictionary; Writing each words in a shape like a circle or triangle; and write each word in a sentence.  Again, this week we have been so impressed with the spelling home learning.  It is clear that the children value the work they are doing and they are enjoying the tasks given so far.  Thank you for your continued support with helping the children achieve this.

Happy Weekend – 18 sleeps…

Team 3!

This week, we have continued to apply our new skill of reading scales to the context of statistics.  We have been interpreting pictograms and bar charts and answering questions such as ‘how many more goals did Manchester United score than Liverpool last season?’ Or probably the more apt questions, ‘how many fewer goals have Manchester United scored than Manchester City this season?’ It hasn’t all been about football statistics though. We have looked at statistics relating to gold medals from the Olympics, traffic surveys and even ice cream data.  We moved onto ‘telling the time’ in the latter part of the week.  We will continue to learn to tell the time to the nearest 5 minutes after the weekend.

During our English lessons this week, we have been writing setting descriptions.  Watch this space for some of the published writing appearing on this blog very soon.  In the meantime, we plan to share our writing with the Year 1 children next week.  The children have worked very hard planning, editing and publishing a description to match a stormy sea scene.

We will be starting our Sustainability unit next week.  This will involved looking at ways that we can contribute to the sustainability of the world through our actions relating to light.  We will be looking at ways that we can save electricity, we will be exploring light pollution as well as looking at some photographs from space which further illustrate the most lit up areas in the world. It is a very exciting unit.  We have now finished our Stone Age to the Iron Age project and so we will be looking for a date shortly to invite parents, grandparents and carers in after school so the children can share their work with you. Date to be confirmed!

Have a super restful weekend  Keep warm and we look forward to seeing you all on Monday!

Team Year 3!