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/

Week Ending 30/09/16 in Year Three

This week in Year Three we have been learning some new words, some new methods of calculations and new ways to make our stories jump from the page like a gazelle (this is a simile).

In Maths we have been using a method of stand up addition and subtraction that has enabled us to perform calculations with both five digit numbers and decimals! 

In English we have been learning what adjectives are, making an “adjective bank” where we can use our adjectives to make our sentences more friendly and more exciting for our readers and we have been learning what a simile and a metaphor is. From here we will move towards using these skills in our creative writing.

In our Topic lessons we have been developing our ability to use tone in our sketches. The children have completed a tonal chart and are now applying their skills to a more complex sketch.

With all these new skills we're looking forward to using them more and developing our abilities.

http://www.yourdictionary.com/index.php/pdf/articles/80.differencesmetaphorssimiles.pdf

Morning Routine

Every day in Year Three, after breakfast, we like to start the day off with our morning routine. This begins by moving into the hall for our morning stretch. We start gently, making sure that we warm up our wrists, our fingers, our ankles and toes before we start with some more dynamic stretches, exercising our core and elongating our spines. We like to end these sessions with a minute’s meditation to remind ourselves why we are here today and what we can bring to the day to make it great.

We then go back into class to hear a chapter or two from our class book. This week we have started The B.F.G by Roald Dahl. 

We then we move into pairs and using our skills of self-assessment and independence we pick our morning challenge for that day. We have a chart on the wall where we can track what we have done and begin with something new for the week. We can choose from: the word game Boogle where we have to make as many words as possible from jumbled letters; the Tube Challenge where we are given two stations from the London Underground network and we have to first find them and then describe how we get from one station to the next; the Maths Game where with wooden tiles we solve problems, Chess; the History Challenge where we place dates in history in sequential order and the Globe Challenge where we are given countries to find.

Once we have done these morning challenges and have tidied up we go back on to the carpet to practise our phonics. Phonics gives us the ability to recognise words and sounds so that we may increase our vocabulary and progress with our reading so we may move to more challenging and longer books.

The morning routines in Year Three are important for your child’s learning and are a great stabiliser for the school day ahead.

Welcome to Year Three 2016/2017

Dear parents and children,

Welcome to ENS Onegino's Year Three blog for the academic year 2016-2017.

We have been extremely busy so far in the three weeks with our work in English, Maths and Topic.

In English we have been making short story plans using a "Roller Coaster" method to examine how stories move up and down, how characters interact with each other to create those movements and how we find resolutions.

In Maths we have been learning about partitioning and column stand up methods of addition and applying these new skills we have been learning how to add decimal numbers. There has been steadfast work in this.

In our dinosaur topic series we have been drawn to the Spinosaurus and through our study of this specific dinosaur we have been learning about where in the world dinosaurs inhabited before the continental drift, what their diet was and the time in history this particular dinosaur lived (Cretaceous period).

Mr Ieuan and Mr Chris hope you enjoy the posts on this blog and the insights into your child's learning.