Welcome to Year 3's Webpage

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               Our teacher for 2011/2012 is Mrs Reid.   

CLASS NEWS:

Congratulations to all children for a fantastic performance in their class assembly.  Mrs Reid is very proud of you all.

Our new topic for the Spring Term is 'May the Force be with you!'  An information sheet for parents will be sent home soon.

Please remember to bring PE kits to school in January.  PE (Dance) will be on Mondays and GAMES on Tuesdays.  Please note that GAMES is outside and warmer kit may be required.

We are looking forward to an exciting, interesting and inspiring year.  Our first topic in the Autumn Term will be The Victorians.  We will be learning about Houses and Homes, School Life, Children at Work, Leisure time, Famous Victorians and Victorian Christmases.

We have made a great start to the new academic year and have learnt so much about life in Victorian Times.

Useful websites....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primaryhistory/victorian_britain/

http://www.strettonhandley.derbyshire.sch.uk/victorians.html

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/victorians-ks2.htm

http://www.brainboxx.co.uk/a4_resource/pages/history/VICTORIANS.htm

http://www.channel4.com/learning/microsites/Q/qca/victorians/timelines1.html

http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk/learning/walk-through-a-victorian-house/

http://www.show.me.uk/topicpage/Victorians.html

We have carried out research in different ways to find information about children in Victorian times.  Sometimes we research bookmarked websites on the computers, sometimes we look at information books and we also interview adults and each other.  This means we are able to learn in lots of different ways.

Choosing role play activities also helps us to imagine what life was like in Victorian times.

We have also learnt about L.S. Lowry who painted industrial scenes showing factories, workers and living conditions at the end of the Victorian era.

We learnt a lot about the artist and his painting technique.  Then we experimented ourselves...

Lowry liked to mix oil paints directly onto his canvases so Mrs Reid banned us from using brushes and we had to use our fingers and old rags to mix paints and make colours.

We had a Victorian School Day to experience first hand what it was like for children.  Mrs Reid was very strict and we had to be very quiet (children should be seen and not heard), very well behaved (we always are!) and work very hard to improve our 3R's.

Lining up beautifully to come in.  The girls curtseyed and the boys doffed their caps to greet the teacher.  Once the register had been taken, Mrs Reid checked our hands were clean and we paid a penny to go to school.

We have to stand until we were given permission to sit.

We also had to stand if someone entered our classroom.

Reading silently and to the class.

Mrs Carrick becomes Mr Carrick for the day!

Handwriting into copy books

Getting the hang of ink pens!

This is hard work!

Oh dear! Someone hasn't learnt their tables!

Using the right equipment

This is for demonstration purposes only and noone was hurt!

Skipping ropes at playtime

Chalks

Marbles

The girls learnt needlework skills whilst the boys did technical drawing.

Smile please!

We have been on a TRIP to the Big Pit in Blaenavon to find out what conditions were like in a mine - this links to our work on children in mines during Victorian times.  We had great fun dressing up in miner's equipment and going down the lift into the mine.  It was very dark and quite scary too!

We looked closely at a number of mechanisms and pulley systems used in coal mining because we will be deigning our own pulley system coal mining models in our Design and Technology lessons.

In Science lessons we are learning about materials.  First we named lots of different materials and found out where they come from and whether they are natural or manmade.  We sorted pictures in a variety of ways such as - favourites, strongest to weakest, flexible to rigid, uses...

We are loving our new laptops and ICT lessons are much more fun.  Thank you to the PTA for raising the funds!

At the end of Year 2, pupils from Year 10 in Whitchurch High School visited to help us design and make tiles for an outdoor display. These have now been fired and we went down to the High School to paint them.

We can't wait for them to be fired again and then mounted on board to be displayed in the playground.

Year 3 have begun going to Forest School on Wednesdays.  To see what we get up to, click here.

Here is just some of what we got up to last year.....

Our final topic for the year was chosen by the children who wanted to find out all about DETECTIVES!! 

Matthew's Mum is a fingerprinter with the Newport Gwent Police and she very kindly visited our class to talk about her job.  It was fascinating to find out about different patterns and how criminals are caught based on fingerprint matches.  We also all had our fingerprints taken and analysed the patterns.  We later used these as basis for some colourful fingerprint Art.  Thank you, Mrs Melvin.

As a 'finale' to the topic, we came in from lunch one day to be confronted with our classroom having been cordoned off as a crime scene!  Someone had been in our classroom and stolen a video camera!  It was our job to look at the evidence - carelessly left items, 2 sets of footprints, suspicious looking teachers - and solve the crime.  So, with police uniforms on and notebooks in hand, we set off to interview all the members of staff.  The questionning techniques were excellent and much information was gathered.  Back in the classroom, we put all our findings together before deciding on a prime suspect.  This member of staff finally cracked under pressure and confessed to the crime.  We cannot print their name for legal reasons!!

Our topic at the moment is BACK TO THE 1960s.  We are looking at a number of aspects of this decade and, crucially, comparing life at this time with life in the 1940s during wartime.

Creatively, we are studying art and artists of the 1960s, including David Hockney, and looking very closely at patterns and textures both in fashion and the home.  We have designed some of our own textile patterns and made paper clothes for our card dolls.  We have learnt basic sewing skills and soon made our own felt from fleece.  Putting the two skills together, we have made an item of clothing for our card dolls.

Next we made our items of clothing.  We used measuring, cutting and joining skills....

New materials and technology led to new toys on the market.  We have looked at some of these and written questionnaires for family members to find out what they used to play with and how the toys compare to what's available today. 

We looked at pictures of 1960s toys and tried to sort them in different ways: boys & girls toys; colourful and battered looking!; our favourite to least favourite etc.

Do you remember paper dolls with tabbed clothes?  We have had enormous fun designing and making tabbed clothing for our dolls.

For Music and Dance lessons, we are joining forces with class J2.  We have listened to lots of 1960s bands and watched their performances on film.  Miss Lisle is a great dancer and has been teaching us the twist, the mashed potato and the locomotion, amongst others! 

All the children are now about to start band practice.  They have formed into 1960s bands and chosen a song to learn and perform.  We can't wait to see the final show!

We have a timeline of events in our classroom and we will be looking more closely at some of these.  For example, we will understand the main events leading up to the first moon landing in 1969.

And finally, to our 1960s party!!  We had so much fun performing on stage to X-factor judges, preparing our own 1960s biscuits and dancing the day away to 1960s music!

In SCIENCE lessons we are learning about SOUND - how it travels, why some sounds are louder than others and how we can make high and low notes.  We will be carrying out a number of investigations and talking about what we have found out.

Useful websites:

http://www.chiddingstone.kent.sch.uk/homework/war/1960s.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/science/physical_processes/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/   (click on Primary; Science; Sound)

Mrs Reid set us the challenge of  using water in bottles to make a tuned instrument.  We played a simple tune on the keyboard and glockenspiels before trying to recreate the tune on the bottles.  We were actually very good at it and passed the challenge!!

MATHS - learning about measuring. We used rulers, metre sticks and tape measures. We discussed accuracy, measurement conversions and tackled problem-solving activities.

SCIENCE - Light and colour. How are rainbows formed? What is 'white' light?

Some of ART work also used effects of light.  We loved the work of Welsh artist, Ian Willams.

In WELSH lessons, we have been learning about ourselves.  We have learnt new vocabulary and some simple sentences to describe ourselves and to say what hurts! For example, 'Mae pen tost 'da fi.'

FILM - We had a great time learning about how to make a film! We were taught how to use our voices, how the camera and editing equipment works and which camera angles to use.  Children took on roles of director, runner, clapboard operator and actors to contribute to a film about life in our school.  Each child was given a DVD of the film - we hope you enjoyed it!

HISTORY - During the first half of the Spring Term, we completed extensive work about World War 2.  We learnt about what it would have been like to live during wartime and learnt about daily life, The Blitz, Evacuation, Rationing amongst other things. Mollie's Great Grandma came in for a question and answer session and we had a fantastic visiting workshop that included rides in a WW2 jeep around the playground!!

To finish our SPACE topic on a high, we visited Techniquest in Cardiff Bay for a 'Space Hopping' workshop.  We were fascinated by all the star constellations and planets in the planetarium and were able to answer lots of questions using our knowledge gained from Science lessons!  We also had plenty of time to investigate all the other exciting activities on offer.

PSHE - We had a visit from our local community police office who talked to us about how to deal with people who may be unkind to us or even bully us.  We played some games to help us to think about how these situations make us feel and how to deal with them.

We have had a very enjoyable time in class this Christmas time.  We have made cards, calendars and stained-glass windows and some beautiful Christingles for the Junior Carol Concert.  Well done to all the children who took part in the Service, it was a lovely evening and the singing was beautiful.

For Children in Need, we asked everyone to wear a funny hat to school.  Here are some of us getting into the spirit....

Our topic for the second part of the Autumn Term was INDIA.  We will focused on a village called Chembakolli and found out about how the people live, what their houses are like and why and learnt about their day to day lives.  Wel then compared this to how we live our own lives in Whitchurch.

In RE lessons we learnt about the Hindu religion and the festival of Diwali.  We also visited a Hindu temple.

In PE lessons we did Yoga, concentrating on breathing, posture, stillness and balance.

We designed and made village houses for our DT studies and investigated Rangoli patterns for Art and Maths.

We completed many activities about symmetry both in our Art and Maths studies.  Can you find the lines of symmetry in this picture of the Taj Mahal?

Here are some pictures of our work so far....

For our Design and Technology project, we studied houses from Chembakolli and then designed our own.  We choose from a selection of materials to make our houses and then made a model village to put them in.  It looks GREAT!

Modelling our houses

The base for our village

One of our Maths activities involved designing rangoli patterns using lines of symmetry.  A lot of us were very clever and managed to reflect our patterns over 2 lines of symmetry.

Our first topic this academic year was the Island of St. Lucia.  We learnt about the Geography and Environment, customs, the people, the food, the festivals and the lifestyle.  We considered the impact of tourism and learnt about the Island's exports. 

We carried out a lot of map work, identifying landmarks and then giving directions to get around the island.  To help us with this activity, we learnt how to use a compass.  This helped us to give accurate directions to follow.

We are learning about the foods that are grown on St. Lucia.  Mrs Reid made us a Caribbean Casserole to taste.  It was a bit spicy but some of us really enjoyed it!  We tried to identify the ingredients and when we had done this, we looked at food chains so that we could understand where the ingredients came from.

Next, as part of Food Technology, we tasted a selection of Caribbean fruit and vegetables and identified those that we liked.  Then we planned a rice dish using some of our favourite ingredients.  We had to take into account which flavours went together, how the dish looked with regard to colour and texture and also how we would present the dish.  A sample of our dishes can be seen below.

Finally, we tasted our dishes and commented on their success or otherwise.  We all had an opportunity to taste others people's dishes too.

In English lessons, we learnt about instructional writing and wrote recipes for our dishes. We have now made a 'Caribbean Rice Dishes' recipe book!

As part of our Music studies, we have been listening to Reggae and Calypso music and learning songs in these styles.  We were also lucky enough to take part in a Steel Pan Workshop with Wadha teaching us the basics.  Interestingly, Wadha told us he was originally from St Lucia!

We used the Flip Video during the workshop and have made it into a film!

In Science lessons, we are learning about the Earth in Space.  We have learnt how day and night occur and how we measure 1 day, 1 month and 1 year.  Next  we will look at the planets - we can't wait!

We made models of Earth and added an axis then used torches and dark paper to recreate and understand how day and night occur.

We have also learnt about how the Moon travels around the Earth and the Earth around the Sun.  Here are some useful web links to further your learning at home:

http://www.videojug.com/film/the-planets-explained - information about our solar system

http://spaceplace.jpl.nasa.gov/en/kids/animations.shtml - space games and animations

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/science/physical_processes/earth_sun_moon/play.shtml - the Earth, Sun, and Moon

http://www.kidsastronomy.com/solar_system.htm - find out about our solar system and the planets within it

http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forkids/kidsclub/flash/index.html - interactive games

http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/solar-system - includes some lovely planet photographs