In RE, we learnt about the visiting of the wise men to see Jesus after He was born. We hot-seated the wise men to find out more about their unusual gifts.

To celebrate the coming of Christmas, we also went to see a pantomime! We really enjoyed joining in with the play and shouted as loudly as we could to make sure Button's special silver key was not stolen. 

To help us celebrate Christmas, we attended Mass with Father Aklilu and Deacon Paul in church this week.

In Science this week we were thinking about working scientifically, especially around the problem-solving strand. Mrs. Rowse set us a challenge to make the longest paper chain from a single sheet of paper. We tried everything, from fat loops to thin loops, long loops to short loops. Here are our results.

Year 3 were re-telling the story of the birth of Jesus today, thinking about why God chose shepherds to be the first people to hear the Good News and visit baby Jesus in his stable.

Year 3 have finished their cards this week, with levers incorporated into them. We worked hard to understand the terms bridge, levers and pivots and have worked hard to put that into practice by making a Christmas card to take home.

This week, Year 3 started to learn around the the theme of dance in PE. We had great fun learning to use music to help us with our movements.

In RE, we've moved on to thinking about Advent. We discussed what the word "Advent" means and how we already prepare for the coming of Christ. We then made our own version of the Advent Wreath, adding our own promises on, mirroring the difficult decision that Mary had to make when finding out that she was going to have a special baby.

On Wednesday, we were really lucky to have a visitor to our school from Active Schools. Deb came to show us how to Speed Stack, a fun, fast-paced game that teaches us hand-eye co-ordination as well as encouraging us to work as a team.

We had a great day, learning the skills in the morning before playing in teams against year 4 in the afternoon.

Our Science unit has progressed from rocks into fossils. To help us understand what fossils are and how difficult they are to find, we went to a local beach, with cliffs, to search for fossils. We had a special visitor, Gary, from the Sheppey Fossil Forum come with us so that we could be sure that what we found were genuine fossils - he was even able to tell us what they were!

Gary then came back to school with us to teach us more about how fossils are formed, what they are actually made of and show us some of his impressive collection.

This week, in History, we began learning about the changes from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age. To help us understand how we know about these eras of pre-history, we acted like archaeologists, unearthing our Iron Age finds, before charting where we found it and what we think the tool was used for.

In Science last week we planned an investigation to find out the best type of rock to build a statue. This week, we carried out that investigation! We followed our plans and were only allowed to use the materials we'd written down. We had great fun working out if a rock would break, be affected by the rain or hurt a child easily if they touched it. To finish, we either wrote a letter or a speech to Mrs Flain to let her know what we found out.

This week in History, we learned about the different inventions during the Stone and Bronze Ages in Britain. We then thought about which era would be easier to live in and why. To help us think critically about this, we had a debate, with one side arguing for the Stone Age being better and the other arguing for the Bronze Age. This really helped us to develop our speaking and listening to each other skills.

In RE this week we thought about what we do when we have good news: we want to share it! We used our own thinking on this to help us understand why Mary travelled 80 miles to see her cousin to tell her the good news of the Annunciation. We also acted the story out to help us with our re-telling of this crucial story.

In DT this term we are looking at mechanisms, specially levers. This week, we've used our knowledge of levers to create a prototype according to a specific design brief - ensuring we've been thinking of lots of different things to make our final product exactly what we need it to be.

This week we had a special visitor from the Dog's Trust: hey run a workshop for us about keeping safe around dogs. We found this really exciting and have learnt lots of great tips.

In Maths, we've been measuring this week. We started by measuring length using metres and centimetres, before moving on too measuring mass on weighing scales.

To consolidate our learning, we took our maths skills into PE! Our PE this week was to see how far we could jump - so we measured our jumps accurately! It was really good fun.

In Science this week, we received a letter from Mrs. Flain! She was looking for petrologists (scientists who study rocks) to tell her which would be the best material for a new statue of St. Edward. As we're studying rocks, we knew we were up for the job! This week, we planned our investigation, looking at the materials available to us and thinking about how we could ensure we came to a conclusion.

In RE this week, we learnt about the Annunciation: when Mary was told she was going to have a special baby. We read the story in the Bible and acted it out before thinking about what Mary was thinking and how God will have chosen each of us for a special task.

In our English and Assemblies this week, we've been thinking about Remembrance. We learnt about why we remember, how the poppy helps us to remember and how we can try our hardest to bring peace to the world. We presented our offerings for peace in assembly.

This week in Science we were learning about the three different types of rock. To help us understand them, we made rocks! We had heated liquid rock that cooled - this is called igneous rock. This rock was then broken into small pieces and landed in layers, making sedimentary rock. Finally, we applied heat and pressure to the rock to make metamorphic rocks.

In Maths this week, we've been learning about multiplication and division. To help us understand these key concepts, we've used arrays to help us.

This week's RE was learning about Buddhism. We reminded ourselves of the story of Buddha and then looked more closely at his teaching of the 4 Noble Truths.

This week in PE we worked on our footwork, remembering how to stop ourselves from falling over when moving in different ways and matching items of PE equipment together.

This week in Science we began our unit of Rocks and Soils. We started by looking closely at the rocks, classifying them in our own different ways and then drawing and labelling our careful observations.