Handwriting practise
This week in Year 3, we have had a big push on practising our handwriting!
We discussed how our handwriting improves when we turn our page to an angle (parallel to our arm) and use our other hand to hold the page steady.
Ensuring that we do these two things whenever we are writing means that our handwriting will be the best it can be!
Help at home by ensuring that when they writing, your child has positioned their page correctly and is using their other hand to keep the page still and watch their handwriting improve!
Living and Learning: MindMate
This half term our Living and Learning lessons are based around the MindMate learning themes of emotions and friendships.
Our first lesson was based around strong emotions and exploring and describing how it feels to be sad/unhappy.
We thought about how others might express feelings of unhappiness and if they did feel unhappy, to practise asking, and listening to, others about what makes them unhappy.
We reinforced that everyone feels sad or unhappy at times and that’s natural.
In our circle time on the same theme, the children suggested some things to do if they were feeling sad.
Would it help if…
- you talked to a friend or a trusted adult
- you wrote down how you felt
- you played with a friend or brother or sister
- you read a book
- you went for a walk
- you did some exercise
As part of this lesson, we did two of the mindfulness exercises taken from this website.
This week, we started our Living and Learning lesson by working together to match emotions to the pictures and explaining the choices.
We recognised that facial expressions can give a big clue as to how someone is feeling.
This video of two friends shows lots of characteristics of a good friendship and a healthy relationship. Friends do have fall outs and we talked about what to say to someone who is feeling upset because they have fallen out with a friend, being teased or is feeling left out.
This was done by putting themselves in their shoes.
Help at home – ask your child to practise what they might say to someone who is being teased or feeling left out.
Living and Learning
This week, our Living and Learning is I know we’re all the same and we’re all different. We watched Elmer and talked about what is different about Elmer and the other elephants. We thought about how Elmer might feel about being different from the other elephants.
SS – Elmer is different colours and the other elephants are grey.
HM – I think Elmer feels fine because he’s just different.
To end the session, we celebrated the differences which exist between our friends and family.
TH – My Dad doesn’t have any hair and I do.
SB – I wear a bangle.
AS – I was born in Pakistan.
AP – It doesn’t matter if you have different skin colour to everybody else – it’s ok.
HA – Seb and I have brown eyes.
Guided reading
On Friday, guided reading books went home with the children. Each week, a target chapter/page will be given to the children; they will need to read up to this target page by the following Friday. Depending on which book your child has, the target page will be different. Here are the targets for Friday 4th March:
How to train your dragon: up to chapter 3/page 45.
Rooftoppers: up to chapter 5/page 33.
The London Eye Mystery: up to chapter 7/page 53.
Extra Time: up to chapter 10/page 37.
Kensuke’s Kingdom: up to chapter 3/page 25.
Science: A smelly experiment!
To kick off our working scientifically unit in science this half term, we planned and conducted a very smelly experiment! The children talked about the different types of variables: control (things we keep the same); dependent (the thing we test) and independent (the thing we change).
In groups, the children measured the starting components – vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. Next, they added them together into a bottle, with a balloon on top, to collect the gas that was created (carbon dioxide). This was an irreversible reaction. Our conclusion was: if we added more vinegar into the reaction, more carbon dioxide would be produced.
The scientific enquiry type was comparative and fair tests.
The children also asked fantastic ‘what would happen if’ questions that helped expand their scientific knowledge. For example: ‘What would happen if we used a different size of bottle?’ and ‘What would happen if we changed both the amount of vinegar and bicarbonate of soda?’.
They loved completing this experiment even if it made our classroom smell like a fish and chip shop!
Spring 2: Week 1
Pancake day
On Tuesday, we learnt all about Shrove Tuesday. We talked about some of the traditions that happen in the United Kingdom. One of the traditions we liked was the pancake racing that happens in Olney, Buckinghamshire. Of course, we had to have a go at doing this ourselves! Click here to watch our races.
One of our chilli challenges this week was to make playdough pancakes and write a list on ingredients.
This week’s poem was Pancakes by Christina Rossetti. On Tuesday, we created a tally of pancake toppings. We also enjoyed eating pancakes and saying the poem. Listen out for our fantastic use of prosody.
Class assembly
Thank you to all the parents/carers who came to watch our class assembly. All the children spoke loud and clear when saying their lines. We’re so proud of all of them. We hope you enjoyed watching it as much as we enjoyed practising it.
Phonics
This half-term, we’ll continue to review and revisit phase 3 digraphs and trigraphs. We will practise reading words with:
– double letters (h-a-mm-er)
– two or more digraphs (ch-a-tt–er)
– ending in –ing (l-oo-k/i-ng)
– s /z/ in the middle (visit sounds like v-i-z-i-t)
– s /s/ /z/ at the end (c-oo-k-s)
– es at the end (t-or-ch-es)
There’ll be no new tricky words this half-term. We’ll continue to recap all the phase 2 and 3 tricky words.
Help at home:
Practise reading and writing all of the phase 2 and 3 tricky words.
Reminders
- World Book Day stay & learn session – 9.00am-9.30am
Come and read a book with your child. You’re child is more than welcome to bring in their favourite book. We alternate years when we dress up – this is not a dressing up year. - Don’t forget to write in your child’s reading record every week.
Please!
Our children love to do junk-modelling in our creative area. They love it that much I can’t keep up with them! It would be great if you could bring in a selection of recyclable packaging.
Science: irreversible changes and controlling variables
In today’s science lesson, we explored an irreversible change. We mixed bicarbonate of soda with vinegar to create a chemical reaction which resulted in the formation of carbon dioxide. 
We then discussed how we could increase the amount of carbon dioxide that was formed and the importance of controlling variables.
- control variables (the variables we kept the same): the size of the bottle, the amount of bicarbonate of soda, the type of balloon):
- independent variable (the variable we changed): the amount of vinegar
- dependent variable (the variable we are testing): the amount of carbon dioxide
We found that increasing the amount of vinegar resulted in the creation of more carbon dioxide. However, the 100ml test (green balloon) didn’t support this finding. Possibly there was too much vinegar or maybe the green balloon made a difference! We discussed how repeating this test would make our date more reliable.
SATs information session
Supporting our school charity
St Gemma’s Hospice is our current school charity chosen democratically by the children.
Today, we welcomed Steph and Stewart from St Gemma’s Hospice for an assembly to find out more about the fantastic work they do in our local community.
Here, two of our junior leaders are presenting them with a cheque for £377 for the money we have raised so far.
Steph and Stewart commented on the impressive behaviour of the children and the intelligent questions they asked.
Our junior leaders are planning a visit to the hospice over the next few weeks to continue this partnership.
Living and Learning: I know that people shout treat others respectfully when online
On the 7th of February, Moortown celebrated ‘Safer Internet Day’ along with lots of other schools and organisations in the UK.
We spent some time learning about how we can work out if online information is true or not. ‘Fake news’ has become more of an issue on the internet and therefore, it is important that the children understand what it is and how to identify it.
We learnt some tips which help us in decipher what is ‘fake news’ and what news can be trusted. Some of these include questioning the source of the information, whether the story appears in more than one place and asking ‘if it feels right’.
We also spoke about the importance of speaking to a trusted adult if we see anything online that worries us.
Help at home by asking your child how they might be able to decipher whether a news story is trustworthy or not.