Today, the whole of Year 3 went on a trip to the Ancient City, Bangkok. Ancient City is an incredible open air museum, laid out in the shape of Thailand. Travelling by electric tram, we saw many important buildings like temples, palaces and the ruins of ancient cities from the early history to present day Thailand. The buildings are replicas of the originals but have been beautifully constructed to portray the history and culture of Thailand. After our tour, and a bite to eat, we wandered around ourselves, exploring the amazing buildings and bridges. Finishing with an ice cream to cool us down, we returned to school hot, tired but very happy with our day out!
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We have been doing A LOT of art and design in Topic recently. Using our learning about Ancient Egypt we have:
Whilst some of these are still a work in progress, the necklaces and canopic jars are finished and look fantastic! Everyone did a great job, really thinking about their designs and the colours that would have been available to the Ancient Egyptians. I was really impressed with the time and care every student took when creating their art work - the hard work really paid off!! As part of our work on Ancient Egypt, we have been learning how the Egyptians made mummies. From hooking the brain out through the nose, to burying people with everyday items to use in the afterlife, we have found the whole process fascinating!
In class, we decided to have a competition to see which team could make the best mummy! Congratulations to Phuket for their excellent teamwork and very impressive, mummified classmate! In English, we have been studying Myths and Legends and read the myth of Odysseus and Polyphemus. We used this to:
- hot seat the characters, thinking about their thoughts and actions - write a wanted poster for one of the main characters, focusing on our use of powerful vocabulary - write a character description of Poseidon, remembering to use all our different sentence openers - role play what would happen if the characters met again after the events of the story Using our role plays, we developed our ideas into comic strips to continue to original myth. While some of us thought the characters would continue to fight, some thought that they would learn from their experiences and try to make things right. Read our comic strips below to see how we thought the story should end... What a start to Term 3! We arrived to find our classroom transformed by Ancient Egyptian symbols and a message left in strange pictures. We discovered that these pictures are hieroglyphics and were used by the Ancient Egyptians to write. Once we had the key, we were able to decode the messages and follow the clues on a scavenger hunt around school. From the classroom, to the art room, to the playground, the race was on to finish the hunt first. Although it was incredibly close, eventually team Lanta were victorious, returning their canopic jar to class first.
Next, we put our hieroglyphic skills to the test by writing messages to each other. We particularly enjoyed aging some paper to created hieroglyphic name tags! Overall, we are very excited to see what the rest of the topic holds! This week was World Literature Week and we have enjoyed a number of book related activities! To kick off the week in style, we all came to school on Monday dressed as one of our favourite book characters. From Disney princesses, to Tom Gates, to Harry Potter, it was lovely to see the classroom so full of colour and excitement! We were also able to create character profiles of some of our favourite book characters - they have really helped to brighten up our Book Corner! On Tuesday, we teamed up with Y6C to share some of our favourite stories! In English this week, we have explored Cinderella stories from around the world! We started by sequencing the French version (the one that's like the Disney film!) to check we all knew the story! Then, we split off into groups and were each given a Cinderella story from a different country (China, Poland, West Africa or Iraq). Once we had read our version, we used a Venn diagram to compare it to the French version. Through this, we realised that, although there are many differences between the stories, there are also a lot of similarities. For example, the Cinderella character is always treated badly but gets a happy ending. Finally, we worked in our groups to create a role play of each story which we shared with the class. Just before you go, check out our entries for the Extreme Reading Competition. Which is your favourite?
This term, in our Topic lessons, we learning all about 'How Humans Work'. We kicked off the term by running a full body MOT to see what we already knew about the human body. Next, we learnt about our eyes and created our own eye tests in order to investigate the effect of light on how well we can see. This week, we moved onto the digestive system. From naming our teeth to the journey of an apply through our intestines, we have really enjoyed learning about the amazing processes going on inside our bodies every single day!
Using this knowledge, we decided to build our own digestive system! It was fascinating to see what happened to the biscuits once they reached our 'stomach' and moving this through the 'intestines' really helped us to understand how the good stuff from food is extracted before we get rid of the 'waste'. As one member of Class 3D said, 'It was disgusting, but very satisfying!' Want to create your own digestive system at home? All you need are some biscuits, a sandwich bag and a pair of tights! All this half term we have been learning about forces during our 'Feel the Force' topic. We have planned and carries out a number of experiments to investigate different forces such as; gravity, friction, buoyancy and air resistance. This week, we were learning about air resistance. We knew that air resistance is a type of friction and can slow things down when they are travelling through the air so we decided to experiment to find the best types of parachute. Working in groups, we chose the variable we would change and considered which we would have to keep the same in order to make it a fair test. Some groups chose to change the size of the parachute and some chose to change the material. Once we had made our parachutes, we used the balcony in the theatre to drop them and timed how long they took to land. We decided that the slowest were the best because they had created the most air resistance. Although we felt that it was not a completely fair test, it gave us a good idea of how size and material can affect air resistance.
This week in Maths, we have been learning all about fractions. First, we started by using shapes to help us understand what a fraction is. Once we understood that a fraction is a part of a whole (with the denominator telling us how many equal groups the whole has been split into and the numerator telling us how many of those sections have been shaded/selected) we were able to name and shade fractions correctly! Today, we were presented with a puzzle from our Headteacher Mr Lane! He said, '1/5 is bigger than a 1/2 because 5 is bigger than 2'. We had to decide whether this was correct and explain why. At first, we weren't sure and felt that we needed more information so we decided to build fraction walls to help us. Once we had built our fraction walls, we could easily see that 1/2 is much bigger than 1/5! We realised that, when the denominator of a fraction is bigger, it means that it is split into more groups so each group would be smaller. We thought about Birthday cake and decided that we would definitely get more cake if it was shared between 2 people instead of 5! So now we have to remember:
THE BIGGER THE DENOMINATOR THE SMALLER THE FRACTION BECAUSE IT IS SHARED BETWEEN MORE GROUPS. As part of our 'Saving the World' topic, we learnt about the deforestation of the rainforest. We did lots of research and had a very interesting debate about whether deforestation should be allowed to continue. To begin with, most of us thought that deforestation should stop due to the environmental damage it causes. However, we quickly realised that it is not that simple! We discovered that lots of people rely of cutting down the trees for jobs and money. Overall, we felt that we needed to cut down the trees in a sustainable way so that permanent damage is not done to the rainforest. To persuade people to help, we created animations to show the effect of deforestation on the rianforest and the animals that live there. |
AuthorMy name is Rebecca Downes and I am the Year 3D teacher and author of this site. You can contact me via email at [email protected] Archives
June 2019
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