Our first week in Beatles Class

Welcome to year 3 Beatles Class! What an epic first week back filled with exciting activities and lessons around our "global changemaker" The Beatles. 

Oracy and drama
To start off, we explored what makes someone a changemaker and used this knowledge to help us research important information about The Beatles. 

We worked in small groups to research an individual member of the band and create a small speech about their importance within the band and how they helped to change the music industry. We were all encouraged to present in a unique way. As a result of this, our presentations were all unique, some of us used different speakers, some spoke as a whole group and some of us even added drama. It was great and we became experts on our changemaker. 

Music
We couldn't learn about The Beatles without listening to their songs and practicing it ourselves! We listened to "yellow submarine" and used paint to represent the notes, rhythm and pace of the music through a variety of brush strokes and marks.

We used Boomwhackers (musical percussion tubes) to understand how notes are used in music and the different sounds they can make. To test the notes we practiced banging them with our hands, on our knees, on the ground, walls, tables and a variety of different surfaces to see how the sound can be changed. After experimenting, we got into groups and wanted to see how we could order these notes into groups ranging from the deepest sound to the highest. 

Boomwhackers was a great introduction to getting into and understanding music. This led to us understanding composition and how to create our own rhythms through a variety of claps and rests. 

Art 
During our first week back, we wanted to create art pieces that were inspired by our global changemakers. We practiced sketching skills such as: using a pencil to draw facial features; sketching circles and how to position facial features on a face shape using grid lines.

We also practiced with acrylic paint things such as:

• what happens when you add more water 
• Wet vs dry paint brushes
• brush strokes
• mark making
• creating textures
• Colour mixing

These skills helped us to create a final piece of one of our chosen Beatles member ready for display around our classroom!

Pen pals
To end our week we were introduced to our class post-box and we were lucky enough to each receive a letter from a pen pal all the way from Alabama, America! We are so excited to write them letters as you can see from our faces.