Teachers: Mrs Baker, Miss Lee (Mrs Durkin), Mrs Eatherington, Mrs Graydon
Teaching Assistants: Miss Acland, Mrs Edwards
Welcome to the year 3 pages!
We are the Gorillas (Mrs Baker and Mrs Eatherington) and the Giraffes (Miss Lee/ Mrs Durkin and Mrs Graydon). Other team members are Mrs Edwards and Ms Ackland.
We started this year with by learning about our class animals. The children took real pleasure in discovering facts about their animals by researching using books and the internet. They went on to produce some detailed non-fiction pages to show the information they had gathered.
After this, the children began a new project focus on Inventors. They began by looking at different inventions that have had a great impact on modern living and then selected an inventor that they wanted to learn more about. They worked hard to research key questions such as ‘What they invented?’, ‘Why they invented it?’ and of course ‘What was its impact on our world today?’
The children had real fun creating their own inventions and particularly liked inventing their own cookies!
The children produced some fantastic non-fiction pages and went on to show other aspects of their learning in our inventor’s exhibition.
We then started our exciting new topic, ‘Why were the Ancient Egyptians the greatest builders in the world?’
The children are learning about the importance of the River Nile and why it was so vital for the Egyptians to survive. They have researched reasons why the Pyramids were built and who they were for. The children have really enjoyed following their own interests such as finding out, Who were the Gods? What happened in the mummification process and writing messages in hierogylphs.
We had an amazing time at the Tutankhamun Museum in Dorchester. Despite the long journey, the children had a fun packed day. They were able to see replicas of many Egyptian artefacts and a life size model of Howard Carter lifting the Pharaoh’s sarcophagus from the chamber!
We have had a busy time finding out about and learning to play a variety of traditional playground and board games. Our children have really enjoyed, not only planning and making their own board games but playing them with younger children in the school. We had fun using a variety of popular culture such as Star wars and Toy story as a theme for our games.
Our literacy focussed on speech punctuation and story-telling using the fabulous text ‘On the way home’ by Jill Murphy.
What an exciting adventure we had when we travelled back in time to visit the Ancient Mayans. Our children researched geographical and historic aspects of this intriguing civilisation including how they farmed the land and the variety of Gods that they worshipped.
In literacy, the children wrote their own Mayan Creation stories in the form of a playscript then performed these to their peers.
In ICT , we have explored aspects of basic programming using A.L.E.X and Scratch.
Wow! What a busy time we’ve had in RE this half term, celebrating Easter and learning about how important forgiveness is for Christians. We have thought about Good Friday and why it might be ‘good’. Surely someone dying on a cross can’t be a good thing, or can it? We have been finding out about the symbolism of the cross, bread and wine and how Jesus used these last two during The Last Supper.
We tried our own bread and wine (juice!) and thought about how Jesus must have felt, knowing that he would soon die.
Here we are discussing what ‘Forgiveness’ means and what makes it particularly important to Christians.
What an exciting summer term we had. We began with our recycling project called ‘Can we make a perfect world for everyone?’ Our children found out about ways to recycle, reduce and reuse. They discovered ways to up-cycle old objects to make something new and creative.
We had an opportunity to follow our own lines of enquiry looking at bigger questions about our world such as;
Why are there homeless people living on our streets? Why are some animals endangered and how can we help them? Why doesn’t everyone have clean water? and What is global warming?
Our children, parents and staff thoroughly enjoyed an exhibition of our learning at the end of the project. We were thrilled with how much we had learned about the world around us and our part in being responsible for it.
We used ‘The Paper Bag Prince’ by Colin Thompson as an influence for our descriptive writing with pleasing results!
This half term in RE, we have been thinking about what the miracles of Jesus tell us about Him. We all researched a story about Jesus healing someone and discovered that Jesus would always be asked for help before they were healed; the blind man asked Jesus to help him see, Simon Peter asked Jesus to heal his sick mother-in-law, and the friends of the paralysed man went to great lengths to take him to be healed by Jesus. We have been thinking about what the definition of a miracle is and discovered how Jesus showed compassion and respect at all times, giving hope to those who were ill. We finished our topic on Jesus’ Miracles by linking it to our class topic, ‘Can We Make A Perfect World?’, writing prayers that reflected Jesus’ and our own School Core Values, asking for help to make our world a better place.