Year 3 prepare for battle!

 Art/Design Technology

Today in year 3, we have researched all about Roman shields. We discovered lots of interesting information about things such as: 

• The designs that would often be on the shields.
• What the shields wold be made from.
• How the handles were fastened, including our own research on how we could attach our handles.
• The shape and size of Roman shields.
• Why shields were used and how they could be used in battle.

We used our artist skills to: 

• Created a design based on Roman gods and other traditional designs.
• Practiced upscaling our designs from our practice A4 to our final A3 work.
• Practiced how to hold our paintbrushes and use beautiful long brush strokes in the same direction.
• Used a variety of different brush sizes to create intricate details and make our work stand out. 

We used our design technology skills to: 

• Explore what materials were used for real life Roman shields and why.
  
• Practiced different ways to attach our handles using a range of different materials.
• Using a pinch and snip technique to cut out a boss for the centre of our shield. 

Year 3 Perfect pottery skills!

Topic

This week year 3 have been getting messy with clay (sorry parents, we promise they wore aprons!) and creating their own Roman pottery. 

Like any great artist:

1. We researched all about pottery, why the Romans used it and why it became so popular in Britain
2. Explored different types of pottery, patterns, shapes and designs and how these could be used to inspire us.
3. Used all of our knowledge to inspire and help us to come up with our own designs.
4. Practiced how to roll, shape and mould the clay.
5. And finally we got onto making!

We were particularly interested in two pot designs, these were called "Pinch Pots" and "Coil Pots". 

Pinch Pots
These were the easier pot to create, we moulded the clay into a ball and stuck our thumbs halfway into the ball. We then used a hand shape (that we called a ducks beak) to shape the clay into a small pot. We think they turned out great and we even managed to put some designs on the outside!

Coil Pots
These we found a bit more fiddly and required us to use a lot more skill and planning to help us shape our pots. Once again we moulded our clay into a ball and then separated this into four equal balls. One of these became our base and the rest we rolled into equal length and width sausage shaped pieces that formed the coils around our pots. Some of us even managed to squeeze in a handle. Great work Year 3!

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!

Roman roads and sneak attacks!

History

This week in history, Year 3 have been developed an even better understanding on the Romans. This has helped us to begin deciding whether the Romans were clever or criminal!

We researched how roads looked in Britain before (they were just mud trodden roads, can you believe it!) and how this changed when the Romans invaded. 

We used our hands to mime building Roman roads, pouring sand and pebbles, layering concrete and finally lifting huge, flat, smooth stones for the surface of our roads. 

Furthermore, we even explored the benefits of a nice, straight Roman road compared to a long winding, dangerous road for armies and bandits to hide around. 

Students appear startled by a sudden ambush of Celtics around the curving, muddy roads.

Sneaky bandits hide around every corner. The invaders were caught at least four times by their enemies, losing all of their weapons, armour and soldiers in the process!

An army ready and raring for a long march.

The straight Roman road left no place to hide, both armies march towards each other.

Year 3 Newsletter

 Year 3 have worked exceptionally hard this week, from historical researchers, mathematical problem solving, wolf lawyers and scientific investigations we have done it all!

History
We have explored how the Romans have invaded Great Britain and considered how they could be considered clever or criminal. 

At the start of the week we thought that the Romans were more criminal as they invaded to steal cattle, land and even people! However, as we have investigated this further we have seen that the Romans were quite clever and brought many good things as well. They helped us create roads, beautiful houses, coins, language and even toilets (lucky us). We presented some key facts to the class and created a fact file of useful Roman inventions.

Maths
In maths, we have been exploring arrays and how they can help us answer tricky word problems. We have practised using number value counters with our learning partners to solve all questions multiplication and division. 

Science
In science we became experts in light and shadow. We turned off all the lights and used our torches to experiment with different materials and their shadows. The aim of this was to see what material would be best for making shadow puppets based upon the shadows they cast.