Year 3 – Foxes and Woodpeckers

Our Amazing Work!

On Wednesday afternoon we had an awesome time in forest school as part of our reading treat.  All those children who read at least 3 times a week get a treat once a half term and this term it was forest school and it was soooooo much fun! We climbed tress, made dens and had a whole lot of fun. We cannot wait until next term for our next treat!

On Monday 22nd May, 10 year 3 and 4 children made their way to Pershore tennis club to take part in a variety of different tennis activities. We had a fabulous time learning new skills and came back very pleased with ourselves.

We have been enjoying ‘The Journey’ in English. We have immersed ourselves into the story. In small groups we acted out the first couple of pages. We even had a narrator. We are spending this unit focusing on improving our vocabulary choices.

We have loved our weekly cricket sessions! We have learned to much and we’re building our resilience. This week we focused on batting and blocking. Look at how well we can strike the ball!

Year 3 enjoyed a school trip to Envirosort as part of our Eco topic. We had so much fun and we learned so much (even the teachers!). We got to see inside the factory and witness how all of the rubbish is sorted. We then put our knowledge to the test and sorted materials and products into the correct category. Super work, Team Year 3!

Year 3 enjoyed a visit from Councillor Alex Sinton from Wychavon council. We discussed how to look after our environment, reduce our waste, reuse different materials and what materials can be recycled.

Today, in ukulele, foxes performed to woodpeckers. We have been practicing a variety of songs over the past few weeks and today was the big show! We gave them a little hint as to what they will do when they start their ukulele lessons after half term. We received lots off applause and cheers and look forward to their concert at the end of the year.

Today we were lucky enough to have our first session with our cricket coach! We have six sessions over the course of six weeks to become cricket superstars. We focused today on catching and also our resilience showing that we never give up, even with things are hard. We really enjoyed it and also had real fun while we improved our catching skills. We cannot wait for our next session after half term.

Have a look at our finished riddles. You can see the board and also some examples of what we have done. We are pretty great at it so have a read!

We have been creating our own riddles in English! We have been using the riddle clues to match the riddle with the picture and hoping that it will inspire us to create our own! We are focusing on our handwriting and trying to be the neatest we can possibly be. Keep an eye out for the results!

In science in year 3 we have been learning all about light and different light sources. We have been experimenting with torches and looking at how shadows change depending on how close the light source is. We had a lot of fun making different shapes during our science lessons and have also been looking at a wide variety of different light sources and reflective materials.

This was Year 3’s first attempt at stop frame animation. The children have really grasped the concept. We are looking forward to becoming more creative and more ambitious with our projects in future lessons. Watch this space!

In Art we have been exploring using different techniques to create tone with a focus on the artist Beverly Brown. Here we have used watercolour paints to create different tones.

We are promoting a love of reading in Year 3! We love our weekly library sessions.

On January 12th we went to young voices at Resort World in Birmingham and it is safe to say that it was absolutely AMAZING! We spent the day rehearsing with all the other children (over 6,500 of them!) so that our songs were perfect for our performance at 7pm. Once it got to 6pm we frantically started searching for our parents as they began to fill the arena! They had front row seats so that was amazing too and they were quite easy to spot with a huge banner and light up gloves! Once the concert began we smiled the entire time and sang our hearts out. If you have never been, make sure you sign up next year as it’s an unforgettable experience.

Year 3 loved participating in a virtual trip to the USA. Pupils made sure their boarding passes were ready for their adventure to several famous cities and landmarks. Using Google Earth and lots of virtual reality sites, we were able to experience what makes the USA awesome. It felt like we had visited the USA without leaving the classroom! We especially loved showing off our line dancing whilst visiting Nashville in Tennessee. Not only were we able to describe physical and human landmarks, we could locate the states on a map.

Wow! What a day we had when we went back in time to the Stone Age. We spent the day living the life of a Stone Age person and learnt all about how they lived, how they cooked, what they did for fun and so much more. We learnt all about the history of the Stone Age and how long it went on for. We watched how they gut and cook fish and they even ate the fish heart! We were not so sure on that bit though. The Stone Age people also made fire from stones and some straw. It was amazing to watch. It really was the most wonderful day and one we will remember for ever!

In our music lesson we were lucky enough to play a mini Cello. Miss Harper brought in her own one and let us have a go at playing it. We loved being able to make different sounds and have a go at something bigger than our ukuleles. Thank you, Miss Harper!

You can now call year 3 professional Bollywood dancers! We were taught how to dance by a professional Bollywood dancer and learnt a whole routine; by the end of the session we looked really good! A big thank you to our teacher for teaching us some history and also a really fun dance.

We had so much on our DT day! We made different chocolate treats and sold them to the other children in school. We loved selling our treats AND we enjoyed buying (particularly the slime!). There were lots of smiles across the whole school!

We performed another science experiment last week! We tested the permeability of rocks and their density. It was a very messy experiment!

Look at our fabulous balancing! We are working so hard on holding a balance.. and trying not to sway too much!

This week we have been reading ‘Stone Age Boy’ in English. We listened to the story, asked lots of questions, sequenced the story and then had a go at some freeze framing. We had SO much fun and there was definitely LOTS of giggling!

Our new topic in Science is ‘Rocks’. We have been exploring the three main types of rock. They are sedimentary, metamorphic and igneous. We have had so much fun exploring different rocks and we even performed an experiment to show the different rock types!

We really enjoyed taking part in some Bollywood dancing last week – look at how much fun we had!

In computing, we have started programming. We have been learning how to give instructions to more than one sprite. We are programming super stars!

Year 3 had a brilliant DT day, building houses. Our aim was to construct strong and stable structures. We measured, cut and joined together different materials. Some of us added lights with switches to our houses.

Foxes have been really enjoying our library sessions on a Friday. We love being able to relax and read together as a class and pick books to read. Each week we get to go and it is a highlight of our English lesson.

As part of the PE curriculum foxes have been going swimming on a Friday afternoon. It is safe to say, we LOVE IT! We are becoming more and more confident in the water, learning new strokes, building stamina and also just having the best time! We enjoy the ‘free play’ part of the sessions as well at the end. Jumping in is the best!

We have been using drama in English to bring our lessons to life! We created different animals using our bodies and also showed these to the class. We discussed what freeze framing meant and how best to use our bodies to create different creatures.

During our science lessons, as part of our animals including humans topic, we got to take part in an experiment. We investigated if people with longer femurs were able to jump further than peoples with shorter femurs. We discussed making it a fair test and how we could go about investigating this statement. It was a really successful afternoon and we got to do lots of jumping!

We have also been enjoying our PE sessions this term. Look at our super jumping and balancing! We even played a bit of tag rugby!

We have been enjoying our weekly sessions in the library exploring fiction and non-fiction books. We love reading in Year 3!

2021-2022

Hadrian’s Wall

Further exploring our Roman topic, today we decided to recreate Hadrian’s Wall. We learnt about why the wall was built, how it was built and who lived behind it. We then used Lego to recreate our own version with fabulous results!

Roman Villa

Today we went to visit a real life Roman Villa! We boarded the coach and with excitement and anticipation made the hours journey to Chedworth. We split into two groups and completed two different activities – mosaic making and a guided tour of the Villa. The mosaics were really tricky! We had to concentrate really hard and make sure that we had a great pattern to stick down. On the guided tour we went back in time and learnt even more about the life of a Roman. It was amazing to have history come to life!

Topic Fair

On Friday afternoon we hosted a topic fair for our family and loved ones. We show cased a variety of things we have learnt over the past year from sorting rocks, to naming the human skeleton and also making a real life volcano! It was a huge success and ended with a filmed ukulele concert. What a year it has been!

Victorian Afternoon

We loved having a look back in time at what the Victorian classroom would have been like. We used slate to write on, had a back board for punishment, a dunce’s hat and much much more. We decided that we preferred a modern day classroom, although this was a lot of fun!

Envirosort

On Thursday we went to Envirosort and had a brilliant time! We learnt all about how household items are recycled and how to become an eco-hero! We spent some time in the classroom, then we were lucky enough to get to go and look inside the factory itself! It was awesome watching all the different machines sorting all the recycling into the right piles to be crushed into blocks or then sent off to other factories to be turned into other things. It was enormous and we learnt a lot! An afternoon well spent!

World Book Day!

During the Autumn Term, Foxes have really enjoyed our Road Trip USA topic. They have explored various geographical features using electronic and paper maps to help them learn more about key human and physical features of this amazing country. We took a look at the continent of North America and even designed our very own state! All the children worked really hard in English, trying to improve their sentence structure and were very proud of their leaflets on San Francisco – here are some examples of their work.

During this Spring Term we are now focused on, ‘The Journey’ by Francesca Sanna, which introduces a powerful and moving perspective on migration. Our aim is for children to be able to empathise with the struggles some people in the world may face and create their own illustrated novel based on this topic. The picture book has some very powerful images which we will be exploring with our own art work using watercolours. Once complete, they will then explore and investigate light, dark and shadows in Science and DT with the end result being a shadow puppet theatre production.

Year 3 explored volcanoes on Hawaii Big Island and loved creating their own. We learnt about magma, molten rock and ash clouds. Also how bicarbonate of soda reacts with vinegar!

In Year 3 we have been looking at rocks and fossils. As part of this unit we need to understand the rock cycle, how rocks are formed and what they are called. We used starburst to help learn! We realised that chopped up starburst is just like sediment and once we squashed it with our hands it then turned into sedimentary rock. After that, we needed heat and pressure to help change the rock again. Mrs Martin used her hair dryer and then we squashed the warm rocks so they all bonded together resulting in metamorphic rock. In order to complete the next process of the rock cycle we needed to use extreme heat, but realised we didn’t have a volcano… so we used a microwave! This then melted the metamorphic rock which, when cool, set and made igneous rock!

Science made fun…and also a bit sticky!