Year 3 Newsletter

Year 3 have had a great week this term and are well underway in all their subjects.

Science

In science this term, we are learning all about the topic "animals including humans". So far we have learnt about the key things we need to survive. Did you know we can only live three days without water? We explored different food groups and how they benefit our bodies. To investigate healthy diets and nutrition we researched our own cereals. We looked at salt, fat and sugar contents and compared them to our partners to see what is the healthiest breakfast cereal. Year 3 loved this, although some were concerned about their fibre intake and wanted to know whether they were pooing enough... Parents, we'll leave that one up to you!

Maths

Maths has been an epic week of place value, understanding three digit numbers, adding and subtracting. Practicing the chant: 100 more, 100 less, 10 more, 10 less, 1 more, 1 less has been great fun and helped the children recognise how the value of digits can change. 

English

This week in English we have been using all of our knowledge and skills we have learnt so far in year three to create our very own story based on Joe, the crayon eating, doodle boy! We have based our story on the tale of "The incredible book eating boy" and have loved using a range of techniques from our writing rainbow such as: alliteration, similes and taste senses to help us create our own unique stories. With some children now expecting publishing contracts, it's been great to see the children foster their love of writing! 

Graffiti: Art or crime?

 Graffiti Workshop

In English, we have been exploring balanced arguments and whether we believe that graffiti is art or crime. To help us gain a better insight into this, we took part in our very own graffiti workshop and created some awesome art styled board. 

We had a great time testing out different techniques to spray the paint, create splatters, designing stencils and even writing our own name! 

Thank you so much to everyone who took part, we had a great day! 

Long, long ago in the Dreamtime...

Today Warhol created their own Aboriginal stories based on 'How the Kangaroo got its Tail'. They used their oracy skills to rehearse the stories before telling them around a 'campfire'. The children wrote some wonderful stories and this afternoon some even created digital storybooks complete with narration and animation!

Year 3 Newsletter

English
In English, we are exploring graffiti and whether it is art or crime. We have looked at a variety of different graffiti artists such as the iconic Banksy and how they have helped to evolve graffiti over the years. Many of the children are torn between art and crime which has sparked some great class discussions! We are using all of our research and ideas to help us write a non-fiction balanced argument piece of work. 

Topic
Over this term, year 3 have been exploring the question: Were Romans (in Britain) clever or criminal? Our latest subject in this is pottery. We have researched:

• Why the Romans used pottery
• How they mass produced pottery
• What impact Roman pottery had in Britain
• How Roman pottery was made

We have used this to help us design and draw our very own Roman pottery and even sculpt two different styles of pottery called Pinch Pots and Coil Pots.

Maths
In maths, we have been exploring perimeter and area. This has led onto us exploring different units of measurements and how we can measure a variety of different things. We have used conversions to help us understand how many centimetres are in a metre and millilitres are in a litre.  

Science
Science rocks this week (pardon the pun) as we have explored how fossils are created. We explored the process that turned some of our favourite dinosaurs into the fossils found today. Once we learnt the process we even gave making our own and they have turned out great! 

Year 3 poetry performances

English

This week year 3 have been practicing and performing their poems for a panel of judges at the Windhill21 Poetry Slam. 

Riley Class performed The owl and the pussy cat by Edward Lear. The judges were blown away with their confident voices, amazing actions and stunning props; also mentioning that it was clear to see that the children had put a lot of time and effort into remembering their parts. Great work Riley Class!

Matisse Class performed Firework Night by Enid Blyton. The judges were impressed with how the children set the tone of the poem and showed the contrast between the scary fireworks and the terrified dogs. Matisse Class placed second at the Poetry Slam, well done everyone!

Matisse class received silver medals for their poetry performance

Year 4 newsletter

 Year 4 have had an interesting week with home learning! We didn’t think we would be having a week off but we all worked so hard to produce some excellent work! 

We began a new unit in writing, working on producing an information leaflet on Antarctica. Each day, we focused on writing about a different area… location, animals, history and glow all warming. The children all worked so hard and produced some outstanding work! 

Just before we started home learning, Year 4 were studying a poetry unit from Jane Considine. We started off by analysing a poem called ‘The River’ looking at its shape and the components that made up each stanza. We then had the opportunity to write our own ‘The River’ poem. The children really worked on linking the noun used to personify the river and the adjectives to describe it. 

Today, we have begun a new unit based on balanced arguments looking at the for and against opinions to whether TV is good for children. We produced a toolkit which we will use when writing our own balanced argument over the next two weeks looking at whether graffiti is art or crime.

Year 1 Newsletter

Year 1 have had a super busy two weeks! We have been practising our poem for the Poetry Slam, learning about 3d shapes in Maths and have spent our PE lessons preparing for Sports' Day. We have been practising skills like javelin throwing, jumping over hurdles, bean bag throwing and dribbling a ball with a tennis bat. We've had lots of fun learning some new skills!      

In Maths, the children have really enjoyed learning the properties of the 3d shapes as well. We have been exploring what the shapes feel like and have experimented with sorting and building with the shapes.

As well as all this, the children have wowed all the Year 1 team with their amazing artistic work. We have been looking at colour mixing and the children completed their very own colour wheel, where we discussed primary and secondary colours. We then looked at the artist Rachael Bennett and saw how her painting imitates the seascape. We tried to mix paints to make a sea effect using tints and shades and became artists ourselves!

 

Year 3 Newsletter

The children in Matisse and Riley class impressed us yet again last week, when they were required to isolate and work from home for a week. As always, we were greeted with positive and smiling faces over Google Classroom. Despite it being a challenging week, they all worked extremely hard, showing resilience and flexibility. We are so proud of them all. 

Here's what we've been up to....

As historians, we've been further exploring why the Romans invaded Britain and whether we think the Romans were clever or criminal by their use of slaves. We've also been studying the picture book, Escape from Pompeii to learn more about the history of Italy. 

 

As petrologists, we have been learning more about rocks. We set up an experiment to investigate which rock would be best suited to replace our roof at Windhill21: granite, chalk or slate? To test the permeability of the rocks we used a pipette to drop water onto each rock and observed what happened. We discussed how we could make it a fair test and took turns to read the instructions, take the measurements and record the results. We discovered that chalk was permeable so would not be a good material for a roof. Slate on the other hand was largely impermeable. 

Next, we performed a scratch test on our rock samples to test the durability of them. We analysed the results and concluded that slate would be the best replacement for our roof! 

At home, we went on a rock hunt around our house and garden to discover how the rocks had been weathered and eroded over time. Some of us were even lucky enough to have fossils at home! 

In English, we've been writing our own traditional story based on the tale, The King of the Fishes. The stories were packed full of creativity and ambitious vocabulary! 

In music, we had a go at learning and performing some tricky body percussion rhythms including 'Boom Snap Clap' and the Mambo Cup Rhythm. It took a lot of practice and patience, but we persevered!