Week Ending 28/10/16

The last week of this term and Year Three have not stopped!

Our work this week has been divided between not one but two projects! As well as continuing our dinosaur project books we have been examining different ways to show and explain Halloween. We've used art and storytelling to really try to understand our fascination with the scary, spooky and unknown.

We wrote our stories that are now on our board by writing one sentence and then passing it to another member of our class who then wrote another sentence until we finally had a fully fledged scary story!

If you would like to spend time writing with your child this holiday week this is a good resource: 5 Writing Games Your Kids Will Love.

We were also drawn to understand more about bats and how they fly. We found out that because bats do not receive enough calcium and can not process it as well as other animals. We also know, through our extensive work on dinosaurs, that this is called an adaptation. If you would like to know more about how bats fly please have a look at this video: How Do Bats Fly?

In other news we have finished our dinosaur project books! We have come on leaps and bounds since we made the transition from Year Two to juniors in Year Three and this is in particular evidence by these books. We have been examining the dinosaurs mentioned in the previous blog posts as well as the primitive creature the dreaded Megalodon. Because of this creature and the Griffin Fly we have had to make sure that our project books have the subtitle: And Other Prehistoric Creatures. 

We've been using our maths skills for comparing different dinosaurs's heights and lengths, art for our dynamic book covers, science for both the biology of dinosaurs and the natural sciences of the world that the dinosaurs inhabited and english which we have been using constantly to give our own voice to explain dinosaurs to the wider world who will read our books. Here are some of our covers:

Mr Ieuan and Mr Chris wish you a happy week off!

Week Ending 21/10/16

On the penultimate week of our first term we have been, as ever, very busy in Year Three!

In English we have been learning about the differences and uses of verbs and adverbs. A verb is a doing or action word. An adverb is a word that describes that verb. Example:
Jack ate his breakfast quickly. With this new tool we are now writing sentences that pack a punch!

In Maths we continued to learn about shape values and properties where we extended our knowledge about vertices, edges and faces of shapes.

In Topic we have been continuing our learning about dinosaurs. Moving on from the Mosasaur we have been learning about the Spinosaurus one of the most fearsome and dangerous of the dinosaurs. We are starting to see ourselves now as amateur palaeontologists!

In the second half of this week and during the course of our last week of term we have undertaken a project which we will encapsulate our skills in English, Topic, Maths, Art and Geography. We are writing a book based on our knowledge and continuing study on dinosaurs and creatures who existed before them.

We have started by looking at three creatures for our project: the Griffinfly, Pelagornis and the Paraceratherium. We have been utilising our knowledge of maths comparing the sizes of these dinosaurs with the largest dinosaur that had ever existed: the Aregntinosaurus. We also made a plan which we can then expand upon while creating our books.

For our project we are learning new ways of researching and using our gained knowledge to make the book as close to a real book as possible. This involves fact checking, conjugating our ideas into clear, legible text and focusing on high presentation. We are going through specific books, using digitised archival sources and high quality videos to understand fully our chosen subject. We are really excited about this project and the new facts we are learning.

Week Ending 14/10/16*

We’ve been very busy in Year Three recently!

During music week we studied the life and work of Johann Sebastian Bach. We found out about his early life and his tutorship under Vivaldi. Through this and listening to his music we created some imaginative art work. In assembly we presented our research inspired by Bach and our art work by the music of Philip Glass.

In Topic we have been studying a creature which lived between sixty-five and ninety-nine million years ago! This creature is called the Mosasaur. In doing so we have learnt about adaptations, habitat, evolutionary processes and the food chain.

In Maths we have been continuing to learn about properties of shapes and shape vocabulary.

In English we have been learning about poetry. We took the opportunity to learn and recite a poem in class assembly. The poem we learnt was Please Mrs Butler by Allan Ahlberg.


*Due to technical reasons this post comprises two weeks of work.

Experimentanium Museum Visit

On Wednesday we visited the Experinmentanium Museum on Leningradsky Prospekt.

There we were able to discover new ways of learning about science through interactive play and through innovative and experimental exhibits.

We travelled through each of the following rooms: acoustics; optics; magnetism; electricity; water; puzzles and mechanics.

We particularly enjoyed the maze of mirrors which we entered and though we saw many different ways of exiting when only there was one! We also enjoyed the bubble room where we were able to create a bubble shield which, for a moment, we were inside! If you would like to learn more about bubbles please follow this link:
http://www.kidsdiscover.com/teacherresources/bubbles-for-kids/