From Party Poppers to Human Number Lines – Year 3’s Weekly Round-Up
Welcome aboard!
This week marks the beginning of our Explorers topic and so we welcome our newest member of the Year 3 team.
A vote was taken to decide their name; introducing… Bobby the astronaut!
(Somehow, tables 1, 2, 3 and 5 didn’t take to the Table 4 suggestion.)
To delve into the mind of an explorer, we had lots of lively discussion about what sort of items they should pack into their travel bag.
From fast food menus (“No! How will they deliver to half way up a mountain?” vs “Yes – we could use the paper to start a fire.”) to party poppers (“We shouldn’t pack it – setting them off could scare animals.” vs “Yes – if we discover a new species, we need something to celebrate with.”), we debated it all. We also used maps to locate supplies lost by our flying ship in a terrible storm:
In maths this week, we’ve been ordering numbers to 1000. This was quite a tricky skill, so we made sure to keep our brains engaged with some active maths. Here we are creating human number lines:
Next, we put our skills to the test in a place value number line challenge. We made actions to help us remember the steps for putting numbers on a number line!
Our English theme for the week has been grammar. We’ve looked at conjunctions, proper nouns, verbs and pronouns. For example, we extended sentences using conjunctions:
Our rusty, old car broke down.
Our rusty, old car broke down although it wasn’t really broken.
Our rusty, old car broke down although it wasn’t really broken, so we had to get a taxi.
To improve the flow of our writing, we looked at changing proper nouns for pronouns. For example:
Jessica waved at Felix and Felix waved back at Jessica.
Jessica waved at Felix and he waved back at her.
Balance, coordination and team work were all skills we used in our PE lesson this week! Maybe one of us will be the next Kyle Wilson!
I’ve been absolutely blown away by the creative homework this week. Each child interpreted the task in their own way and produced some wonderful results. We really enjoyed discussing our own efforts and the effort of others. Here are some highlights, featuring the character Dark himself!
Well done to certificate winners Setayesh and Musa! Both of you are an asset to this class and it’s great to see such enthusiastic and responsible learners!
Homework
Ever wondered what it would be like to be shipwrecked on a desert island? Well, we have!
Our homework was a creative one.
I can show what I think it would be like to be Robinson Crusoe.
This homework was designed to whet children’s appetite for our new class novel, which we started to read this week.
Robinson Crusoe was a man who was shipwrecked on a desert island. For this homework, we wanted children to imagine they’ve been shipwrecked with no technology, just some basic tools.
- What would they do first?
- What would they need?
- How would they survive?
How would they try and contact home or get off the island?
Well, the children certainly got creative. Using the ideas above, we saw some fabulous ideas with such attention to detail.
We enjoyed looking at and commenting on each other’s work. Take a look for yourselves.
Practice that feels like play!
Practice that feels like play! Does this sound beneficial for your child? Have a look at IXL. It’s an online tool where you can access different activities to help your child practise basic skills.
It’s split into year groups, specifically looking at English and Maths, then each subject is broken down into sections. You can get a flavour of the activities by hovering over the title and can have a go at some of them – it looks great fun and very child friendly. The questions are all interactive and there are detailed explanations for new concepts.
There is a small monthly fee if you wish to sign up. Take a look – it might be something you want to explore.
Ukulele
Year 4 have started to learn how to play the ukulele.
The whole class are thoroughly enjoyed these weekly sessions, and so far have really impressed the music tutor. The children have begun to learn some of the basic notes and finger positions. They will, in time, go on to playing songs.
Explorers
This week, we’ve become explorers as part of our new big topic. Explorers is a geography driven topic that will see us embark on a journey round the world (not literally!) as we start to see that the world is bigger than we think.
Yesterday, we started by scouring through some atlases to see where in the world we’d like to explore further (LO: Where would you like to explore?). Then, we saw some images of amazing places from all seven continents (ask your child to name the seven continents) and imagined how cool it would be to explore them. In our books, we chose our favourite place and said ‘I know…I think…I wonder’.
Today, we became virtual explorers by using Google Earth to explore some places we fancied visiting. We discussed the physical and human features of place and compared some of them to a place we are all familiar with: Moortown. It turns out, the Great Barrier Reef is nothing like Moortown Corner!
After being ‘wowed’ by the wonders of modern technology, we used a good old fashioned OS map to explore some places a little closer to home (LO: What can I learn from a map?). We discussed what we knew about each place just from looking at the map and then we used a key to decipher what some of the symbols meant (ask your child if they can remember any).
When we started to read our class novel, we noticed a map on the inside cover. Isabella, the main protagonist, is about to embark on a journey that will see her explore the mythical, dangerous land in which she lives. We presumed the Isle of Joya was a completely fictional place until we noticed something on this page…
After typing the latitude and longitude into Google we discovered that they are for an actual place: La Gomera. It turns out, the novel is loosely based on the author’s holidays to the Canary Islands as a child – obviously, she’s added in some mystery and magic! To link with our map learning we created our own key and added symbols to the map of Joya. We used some of the setting descriptions within the book to help and predicted what might lie in the forbidden woods!
So, in our topic this week we’ve explored using OS maps, explored using atlases, become virtual explorers and explored a fictional land.
More on algorithms
Last week, we reminded ourselves about algorithms and practised giving them verbally through drawing pictures. This week, we made it a little more complicated by writing an algorithm to get a friend through an obstacle course.
As we realised what worked and what didn’t, we had to debug our algorithms to make them successful.
Where do you want to explore?
We kicked off our Explorers Big Topic today by discussing where we’d like to go exploring. The children shared their thoughts with each other and then their partner fed back. There we re lots of interesting places mentioned: the bottom of the ocean, into space, New Zealand and many more.
Then, we used the Atlases to remind ourselves of some key geographical vocabulary: hemisphere, continent, tropics, ocean names, etc. They also prompted us to think about other places (on Earth) that we’d like to visit which we then visited – via Google Earth.
Finally, we explored some fantastic images – all of which were real places on Earth – and chose which one we’d travel to if we could and why. The Plitvici Lakes in Croatia were most popular in our class.
Learning workshop
Don’t forget our Learning Workshop on Wednesday 20 September at 6pm.
Come along and find out what your child will be learning and how you can help support this learning at home.
The workshop will be an opportunity for you to find out what a typical day in Reception looks like and how you can contribute to your child’s learning journey.
See you there!
Our first week!
Spectacular science
Yesterday, we enjoyed a mind-blowing science lesson in which we practised our observation skills (LO: To be able to use observations to verify predictions).
We started off by moulding some ‘Soapy Foam’ (other brands available) into a sphere.
We knew we were going to leave the soap (untouched) all day. We each made a prediction about what we thought would happen:
- ‘I think it will shrink because the water in the soap will evaporate.’
- ‘I think it will expand because of the pressure from the air.’
- ‘I think it will turn into a puddle because it will melt.’
Then, as a group, we ordered our predictions from least likely to most likely.
We observed the soap throughout the day. This is called an ‘observation over time’. Ask your child what happened and encourage them to explain why they think this occurred.
In the next part of the lesson, we filled a small glass with water. We filled the glass to its absolute full capacity – ask your child what we noticed about the top of the glass. On the table, we had a range of items (cotton wool, counters, paper clip, Base 10 rod, Multilink cube) and predicted what would happen if we put them in the glass. Obviously, the water would be displaced and overflow, right? Well, we all decided that the cotton wool had the best chance of fitting in the glass without any water spilling over the slides so we investigated. We put the cotton wool in the water and observed what happened…
You’ll never believe it but the cotton wool went into the glass without a single drop of water being spilled! Ask your child if they can explain to you why this strange phenomena occurred (hint: think about particles and the three states of matter).
Everyone’s mind was blown. Especially this person…
