Week beginning 21.09.15

Literacy 

This week in literacy we have been planning and designing our very own dragons ready to write our own information reports next week. Drama activities helped us pull together our research, questioning and sentence construction skills as we interviewed our expert Dragonologists for Necton Primary Channel 10 News! We have also been working on making our sentence starts more engaging for the reader. 

Maths

We have been continuing with addition and subtractions practise this week and are feeling much more confident with calculating larger numbers. We are using our partitioning knowledge to calculate using a  number line. Next week we will be moving onto multiplications and division. Well done to those who have been earning their bronze, silver and gold stars for committing their multiplication tables to memory. This knowledge will come in very useful over the next couple of weeks as we start a new unit on multiplying and dividing. Keep practising, using your chart, with those at home. 

Science
Continuing with our topic of forces, we have been experimenting how to increase a force and the affects this has. We made our own rubber band propelled paper planes releasing a burst of energy to increase the distance travelled and the speed. Look out ahead! 

PE
Fluidity, posture and control have been the key words this week in PE. We have been putting together balancing and roll routines and evaluating our performances. 

In other news...

A quick reminder that the School Book Fair is in school until Wednesday. Also, in recognition of European Day of Languages, Mrs Simm has organised a European food quiz with a £5 book token as the prize so please encourage your child to enter. I am also pleased to report that many children are achieving lots of stamps as the Read to Succeed scheme continues. It's lovely to see so many enthusiastic readers and would like to take this opportunity to thank your for your support. Reading every day at home really does make such a difference.

Finally, we look forward to seeing all those who can make it at the church on Thursday for the Harvest Festival Celebrations to enjoy a performance of songs, poems and prayers. 

Where did the week go!

We started the week with an ICT extravaganza! We used interactive balance scales to help us write balanced number sentences whilst developing our understanding of the equals sign. 

In other maths news, a welcome game of Tiddlywinks lightened a lesson of challenging mental addition and subtraction. 

We also used the I Pads to research events and inventions throughout history to add to our timelines. In literacy, we were back in the suite again reading and researching different types of dragons for our work on explanation texts. All this ICT practise made Year 3 the perfect people to be website reviewers, as we started our computing topic 'Using the Internet Efficiently and Safely'. 

Science this week was fun, as we investigated factors that increase and decrease friction. We found out the the class is quite handy with a pair of chopsticks! 

In art we have have been continuing our work with water based and water repellent materials. We have been really careful whilst using the stain Brusho! Developing our skills and technique ready for when we start our study of the artist Paul Caulfield next week.

Mysterious egg update...due to some strange wobbling and cracks appearing we have decided to seek expert advice and have written letters to the Natural History Museum in London to help us solve the mystery. The egg has been packed off and will hopefully be returned soon with some answers.  

  

Our First Week

Welcome parents, carers, friends and family to our Year 3 blog. Our class has had a fantastic start to Key Stage 2 enjoying lots of new learning opportunities. 

Music

On Monday we met Mrs Furnell our specialist music teacher. We discovered that we have a very musical year group this year, as we worked on keeping a steady beat and holding a rhythm. This is all in preparation for when we start to learn the viola in a few weeks. 

Spanish

Another new lesson for Year 3! We started off our Spanish lessons by learning how to greet people in Spanish. I'm sure if you asked them, your child would be willing to give you a performance of the 'Hola' song we have all been practising. 

Maths

In maths this week, we have been really busy partitioning numbers, adding on and taking away 1 and 100 and solving other place value problems. We have also enjoyed using lots of maths equipment to represent numbers in a variety of ways. Don't forget to practise those multiplication tables at home to earn the gold, silver and bronze award stars. 

Over the next couple of weeks we will be progressing with our adding and subtraction strategies. You can find more information about the methods used in the classroom on the school website in the calculation guide. 

Literacy

There was much excitement this week with the launch of our new reading scheme Read to Succeed. Year 3 responded with much enthusiasm, with many children enjoying lots of reading time at home and gaining lots of stamps in their home school diary. 

Finally, a mysterious discovery occurred this Friday. An enormous egg was found in the wild area abandoned by a distant time traveller! Straight away Year 3 were struck with inspiration producing some fantastic descriptive writing and some monster themed artwork. The unusual find is currently resting safely in the classroom. We are all wondering if the egg will hatch...