Year 3
Welcome to Year 3!
Your teachers are:
3BS 3P 3T
Mrs Balmer Miss Philpot Mr Turton
& Mr Smith
Your teaching assistants are:
Mrs Stanley Mrs Beasley Mrs Cook
We are looking forward to learning and working with you this year!
WELCOME TO YEAR THREE - where we learn, respect and share...
POSITIVE MINDSET - We are all working hard to have a positive attitude to our work and our learning. We understand that sometimes new learning is tricky, but if we stay calm and try our best we will achieve new skills.
3T Maths Day! The children enjoyed creating their own 3D shapes out of art straws. They were focusing on the properties of the shapes that they created. There were some very imaginative outfits!
SCIENCE - What's inside you? we have been exploring which bones are inside us. Our first predictions were very interesting!
19.4.2016 3T:
Year 3 had a fantastic opportunity to visit the British museum. The children explored certain rooms in the museum relating to the topics which we have covered over the course of the year. The bronze, iron and stone ages were explored alongside the Romans, which is a new topic the children have recently been introduced to. The children were able to take pictures of the exhibits which interested them the most.
Some groups were lucky enough to speak to an expert and were able to touch some of the artefacts, some of which were over 3000 years old!
After we had explored the specified rooms, we had a chance to explore more of the museum. We agreed upon exploring the Egyptian and the Ancient Greece rooms. We were not disappointed with the amazing exhibits on show.
The children enjoyed the visit and behaved well throughout. Hopefully, their interest in visiting museums would have been heightened and they can explore the rest of the museum, free of charge, in their own time, to see more of the amazing rooms and exhibits which they didn’t get to see.
19.4.2016 3T Visit to the British Museum
British Museum visit April 2016
ENGLISH Discussion texts - our class debate. Which makes the better pet - cats or dogs? What's your opinion?
SCIENCE - spring has finally arrived and we have cleared our class gardens of weeds and have turned over the soil, ready for planting once the frosts have passed.
3T World Book Day: For world book day the children dressed up as their favourite book character. The children all came in fantastic costumes and discussed with the class why they picked their particular character. Harry Potter seemed to be the most popular choice, with three different versions being present on the day!
3T Food tasting:
As part of our design and technology work this term we have been looking at healthy eating and having a balanced diet. The children have been exploring sandwiches and by the end of the term, the children will create their own sandwich for consumption, so they better make it a tasty treat!
We have been looking at opinions and discussions during English and for this topic the children debated their favourite sandwich fillings.
Linking to maths we created a tally chart for our favourite fillings and presented them in a bar chart. It turned out that ham was the favourite of the class, closely followed by chicken. The children enjoyed the food tasting and the majority had a go at the dreaded Marmite! Regan enjoyed it so much he took home the treat as a reward.
All children did well to get out of their comfort zones and tried different fillings and maybe opened up some new taste buds!
3T Food tasting
P.E. LESSONS
We have been exploring the gymnastics equipment and improving our fitness levels and stamina in P.E lessons. What fun we have been having!
RE We looked at famous artists’ paintings of the various stages of Our Blessed Mary’s life and identified what they were called and which part of her life they represented. In groups, we then used drama – through tableau - to recreate each painting in our own way. Everyone worked very well together. Miss McAnally
ART and DESIGN - our beautiful Islamic prayer mats (fabric painting in teams)
HISTORY - We wanted to understand how early man made their homes out of sticks and mud - was it really that strong? So we set about investigating by making small models of wattle and daub walls. It was very messy, but once it dried it was amazingly strong! We could understand how effective it was, and how cheap to build!
Design and Technology: Pump pop ups!
Louisa Johnson (a past pupil of our school visited us as part of the X -Factor finals preparations. It was so exciting and she sang beautifully. We all loved watching the camera crew filming the show. Did you spot us on TV?
3T Chance to dance with the Royal Opera House. This week was the final week of the chance to dance lessons. 3T have enjoyed the ballet lessons, which have been taught over a six week period. Below are a sample of our final performance moves from the 'Nutcracker'.
English - We worked in discussion teams to plan and write up a set of step by step clear instructions for another group to follow. We had to make sure that we included all the features of instructional writing and didn't leave anything out as the group following our instructions would be annotating our work with a red pen if they had to add anything to it! This was a fun and practical way to show us how specific and clear we need to be when creating well written instructions. We had to ensure that all the features were included - such as: imperative verbs (bossy ones), adverbs of time and of manner and clear and to the point sentence construction. Each group managed to follow our instructions with success!
Science - We investigated the factors affecting the growth of plants by setting up five experiments to test the effect if the factor was removed - eg: one of the plants we removed all of its leaves (poor thing!) to test whether or not the plant would die if it couldn't manage to make its own food. The plant is very clever (it is a producer) and makes food in its leaves - combining air, water and sunlight to produce food via photosynthesis! We predicted three possible outcomes of our experiment - 1) That the plant would just droop and look weak and unhealthy; 2) That the plant would attempt to grow some leaves again and 3) That the plant would weaken due to lack of food, then starve and eventually die. We are going to monitor our plants over the next few weeks up until half term, and record our progress. Plant one has no water, Plant two has no leaves, Plant three has no air (covered in bubble wrap, Plant four has no light (covered in black paper) and Plant five has no soil 0 we took it out and put the plant back in the pot without it (aren't we mean?) Watch this space for results...
Science - We wanted to show what we already knew in Science for our new topic of 'Plants'. Each table group had an open question set and we had 3 Minutes in which to write down everything we knew in answer to that question. After the time was up, one of us stayed behind as an 'expert' to explain what we had done to the next group to come to the question table and the whole class moved round the room. Once we had written as much as we could, we returned to our first question and had five minutes to summarise and present the findings to the class as a whole. We realised that we had quite a lot of knowledge about plants between us!
SCIENCE - we have been learning about pollination and the part insects play in this process. In this lesson, we used Art materials to create visual images of how this process happens.
Art - We created some lovely mosaic effect Christmas cards this year. We interpreted the Holy family and the birth of Jesus in a stable theme in a very modern way with simple shapes and bold colours. We used templates for the main body shapes and layered the pieces of card to build up the image. The mosaic patterns were unique.
Design and Technology - Making pneumatic toys for Christmas presents in Class 3BS. We used our Mathematical knowledge of nets to create a 3D cuboid out of card. We then punched a hole in the base of one or the corners and added the plastic tube and syringes. Fianlly we decorated our box and added a character who would pop up as the syringe was depressed. Great fun!
Making our Christmas cards in 3P.
This week we learned all about our new Science topic of FORCES through PE!
We found out that forces can be a push or a pull, and that there is often a change of direction involved too!
We worked with a partner to feel the equal and opposite force of resistance and explored lots of activities with different equipment to see the effect of the force of Gravity!
Have a look at our gallery below to see us in action...
Design and Technology - We had a great time when the Roots to Food road show came to S Thomas'! Years Three and Four took part in a bake off competition where each team had to create a healthy and delicious meal in 20 minutes flat! Mrs Harris was team leader for the Orange cooks and Mr Smith was team leader for the Green cooks. Great fun was had by us all and we learned a great deal about food groups, a healthy diet and a few quick and easy ways in which to prepare and cook food. The meals looked very colourful and delicious - guess which team won?
3P's erupting volcanoes!
In ART lessons, we have been learning all about the Primary and Secondary colours and how to create them.
There are three Primary colours and they are:
RED BLUE YELLOW
If you mix them together, you can make the Secondary colours:
PURPLE GREEN ORANGE
we also learned that by adding white to a colour, you make a TINT
and by adding black to a colour, you make a SHADE
Have a look at our gallery of photos, seeing us colour mixing - watch this space for further paintings...
During the first few weeks, class 3P did a few investigations. This include: a boat making and floating experiment, where the children had to make a boat out of plasticine. They then had to test the boat to see if it floated. Through a lot of trial and error, most of 3P were able to make their boats float. Next, we did a gnome home experiment where we had 7 cubes and had to see how many different gnome homes we could make. One pair managed 34!! Well done Matthew, Lydia, Joseph and Paulina!
