St John the Baptist CE VA Primary School Year Three

This week it is Environment week and we have been having lots of fun looking at our local environment and thinking about what we can do to help keep it looking as beautiful as it does now.

At school we have taken part in lots of different activities. We went pond dipping in our school pond and investigated to see what insects we could find in there.

 We also planted our own poppy seeds in the school and have helped to clear up our environment by going on a litter pick. Some of us enjoyed this so much we convinced our parents to take us out locally so we do some more litter picking.

We understand that there are lots of different things we can do as a school to help our environment and have been coming up with a list of things we can do! We decided that the easiest way for us to help was simply by walking to school each day or parking further away if we live a little too far to walk!

This week in year 3, we made mosaics.

This is how we did it.

Step 1. Cover square tile in PVA glue.

Step 2. Put small mosaic pieces in place make sure you leave a small gap between each one.

Step 3. Leave for 1 hour to dry.

Step 4. While the tile is drying, mix up your grout.

Step 5, carefully spread the grout over the tile. Make sure you fill in all the gaps. You should use a sponge to spread the grout.

Step 6. Wipe the tile clean with a clean sponge.

When you have done all of this you will have a beautiful mosaic tile. You will need to leave it for 3-4 hours for it completely dry.
We really enjoyed making the mosaics because it was messy and fun. We knew we had to be careful to make sure our designs matched our tiles.

By Barney and Teddy  

Last week was World Book Week. On Thursday, we had lots of fun dressing up as our favourite book characters. We had some traditional tale characters, witches and wizards, some David Walliams characters, super heroes and more! Can you spot Wally in this picture?

The book that Year Three looked at this year was The Tear Thief by Carol Ann Duffy. We really enjoyed the story and loved writing our own Tear Thief poems too!

This week we have been word detectives. We have looked at adding prefixes and suffixes to different root words. We were quick to realise that adding a prefix usually meant that the meaning of the word changed and lots of suffixes were used to change the tense of the word or how it was used in a sentence.

This week we had some fantastic volunteers from the church come to talk to us about the Eucharist Journey. We learnt about the last supper and how the bread and wine is symbolic of the blood and body of Jesus.

We loved making our own crosses and sketching a church chalice.

Every week Mr Wright from Simon Balle comes to visit us and teach us some music. We have learnt a lot about keeping the beat this week and some of us are becoming pretty expert at it now. We love getting the instruments out and playing along in time with his beat. We each get to try all of the different instruments and we are given challenges to see how well we can keep in time.

Last week, some of the children from year 3 had the opportunity to take part in a speed stacking competition. Although it was pretty nerve-wracking for some of us because it was our first ever competition, we had a lot of fun and all managed to beat our previous personal best. We had to compete individually and as a team and we were all excellent at cheering each other on.
HWSSP, who hosted the competition, commented on our perseverance which we thought was fantastic seeing as it is our school value this half term!

In maths, we have been looking at different ways to show our multiplication facts. We looked at multiplication as repeated addition and looked at the different language around multiplication.

‘If you have 6 groups of 3 you will have 18 altogether’

‘3 lots of 6 is 18’

‘6 multiplied by 3 is 8’

‘3+3+3+3+3+3=18’

In Year Three, we have been looking at poetry. We thought about different techniques that poets use such as rhyming, alliteration, repetition and personification. Can you spot which techniques this Year Three poet has used?

When everyone is different
The world is much more fun
Because it is exciting
For everyone
 

When everyone is different
The world is a better place
It is more exciting to see a different face
 

When everyone is different
There are more things to do
People laughing, joking
Making stuff up too.

By Teddy

This term, Year Three have been looking at light and shadow in science. To explore the effects of where a light source is coming from we have been creating our own shadow puppet shows this week. We have been working together in small groups to create our own shadow puppets and scenery.

During our English lessons, we have been looking at plays and have written our own scripts based on a traditional tale to use when we perform our shadow puppet show.

Year Three had a very exciting afternoon this week. After lunch we found a strange footprint in the classroom. After some research, we discovered it must have been a mammoth footprint. Quickly, Miss Gamby handed out our spears so that we could catch the mammoth. We crept out on to the playground and hunted for more clues for the mystery mammoth. We found more footprints and a trail of mud leading to the field. Unfortunately, we did not find the mammoth but we did have some fun throwing our spears to practice in case we do find a mammoth another time.

By Barney, Teddy, Frankie and Noah.

We have been doing lots of work on our Stone Age topic this week. We loved looking at the stone age cave paintings that have been discovered across the world. We noticed that they often drew animals, fire and weapons. They also painted around their hands a lot too, we think this might be to represent the different families and groups that lived in their village. We created our own using chalk in similar styles and thought carefully about the types of colours they would have been able to use in prehistoric times.

This week, in our English lessons, class three have been looking at Stone Age Boy. A story all about a boy who falls down a hole and travels back in time. Before we read the story, we made predictions using only the front cover from the book. Some of us even noticed that the boy was wearing trainers so he can’t have possibly been from the Stone Age. Once we had listened to the whole story, we used role play to retell the story in our own words and came up with some actions to help us remember the key events of the story. We really enjoyed coming up with our own actions and some of us were very imaginative with them.

Here is a photo of some of us celebrating catching a reindeer by having a dance around the campfire.