Week 5

This week we have been met with a lot of exciting learning! We started the week with learning a little about the music played at a Chinese New Year Festival, and we created our dragon masks. We are excited to create pentatonic melodies next week, and use our masks to create a performance for the Chinese New Year, which has just passed.

In English, we have been learning all about persuasive writing, to prepare for writing our persuasive letter to the Settlers who came and took the land from the Native Americans, in North America. In this case, we are the Native American's from the Powhatan Tribe... persuading the settlers to return the land and find somewhere else to migrate to.

In maths, we have now finished our fractions unit. We have learnt all about unit fractions, non-unit fractions, and we are now able to group and compare fractions in ascending and descending order. We are going to continue to recap this learning through early morning work and starters in maths lessons, to ensure we are consolidating our new learning and making relevant links. We have now started a new topic: mass and capacity. This week, we have had a recap lesson which was based on the year 2 curriculum for this topic, so that we can find out what we already know and what learning we need to revisit.

In food technology, we have had the amazing opportunity to meet Scott from the Wild Classroom. Scott did some outdoor cooking with us... over a fire! This was very educational experience and we loved it! We made Hungarian Bigos, with sauerkraut, halal chicken, mushrooms, onions, tomatoes, and various seasonings! You can visit the slideshow below to see some images of our cooking lesson with Scott.

Chartwell's food workshop

We looked at each section of the Eatwell Guide plate. We found out, through a workshop with Chartwells, that we can eat a balanced diet if we have something from each part of the place in our meals. We now know that the items on the outside of the plate, such as chocolate and crisps, are not that healthy and should therefore be eaten sometimes... as a treat.

There are some photos of us below creating a balanced meal with the following ingredients:

Tortilla wrap - carbohydrates

Chickpeas - proteins 

Carrots, red onions, cucumber, sweetcorn - vegetables (fruits were not suitable for this type of wrap!)

Cheese - dairy and oil

By making our wrap, we ate a healthy and balanced meal!

Food tasting in food technology

In food technology we have had a lesson where we tasted a range of different foods. We tasted:

- Celery

- Carrots 

- Raspberries

- Cheddar cheese

- Cucumbers

- Apples

- Bananas

- Bread

- Lemon (which made us pull a funny face!)

We then discussed which of these foods we might want to put together and why. This way, we can start to think about what kinds of meals we may be able to have with these foods. It is important to taste different foods, especially if they are on the NHS Eatwell guide. You can find the NHS Eatwell guide below this text, to further support our learning at home,

KCSP Science Day - Friday 8th March 2024

Week 3

Year 3 had the most brilliant time during KCSP's Science Day on Friday 8th March. We did an experiment on biscuit dunking, to determine which biscuit took the longest amount of time to deteriorate. The theme for this Science Week is time, so we looked at the biscuits over time and measured how long it took for the biscuit to break into the water. This allowed us to determine that the chocolate bourbon is the best biscuit for dunking out of the options we had! These options were custard creams, chocolate bourbons, nice, and malted milks. 

We were also learning about our bodies and body parts. We learnt about the functions of each part of our bodies and labelled a big diagram with this prior and new knowledge! It was very funny trying to draw body outlines using our friends in class! 

Week 2

Wow, week 2! We have been excited to continue our learning into the second week of term 4.

In maths, we started a new topic... fractions! We learnt that the denominator, which is the number at the bottom of the fraction, represents the amount of equal parts. We call this the robot denominator to make our learning more interesting. We also learnt that the numerator, which is the number at the top of the fraction, represents the parts we are counting or working with. We call this the ballerina numerator, because the number is at the top, like a ballerina holds their hands! We applied this learning to something we all have in common, our love of cake! Mrs Horsfield had her birthday on Monday, so this was very relatable. We were able to determine, that the smaller the denominator, the bigger the part. Therefore, the less people the cake is being shared between, the bigger the cake!

In English, we have been planning our non-chronological reports about the Native Americans. We have been able to apply our learning in History to this piece of writing, which means we can expand our learning further. So far, we have found out that a non-chronological report consists of a title, introduction, paragraphs (each with their own sub-heading), and a fact box... all which we have now planned. We are ready to start writing our final non-chronological reports in week 3 of term 3, where we will demonstrate our neatest presentation and handwriting. This week gave us the opportunity to use purple pens to edit our own work.

In our year 3 class assembly, we presented our knowledge of what happens during the preparations for Easter. There is a story about Jesus resisting temptation from Satan in the wilderness. In the 40 days leading up to Easter, we give something up for Lent. This is why we have Shrove Tuesday, to use up all our leftover ingredients in readiness for Ash Wednesday, which marks the first day of Lent. We were excited to see our grown-ups at the assembly, and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

In Science, we have been learning about the nutritional information in foods. This is important because we want to know exactly what we are consuming, in order to stay healthy. As our topic this term is all about humans, this was a good opportunity for us to discover how to find out what nutrients are in the foods we eat, as well as the allergens. We looked at the McDonald's menu and discovered that it is not as healthy as other whole foods, like vegetables and fruits. We created a chart with the nutrients for these foods.

In History, we have been learning about The Buffalo and how the Native Americans used this animal for different purposes. We found out that the skin is used to make clothes and cooking vessels, whilst the flesh and tongue were used to make meals! We later applied this knowledge in our planning of our non-chronological reports.

Welcome back to school in term 4! 

Week 1

In week one we dived straight into our class book, Bill's New Frock. This is a humorous and engaging text, and after reading just one chapter, year 3 are loving it. We are excited to start this term's reading journey and have been looking at retrieval in reading comprehension. We have been using evidence from chapter one to answer questions that allow us to have a deeper understanding of what we are reading.

In Maths, we have been looking at measuring in millimetres, metres, and centimetres. This is an important skill because Miss Kowalska once forgot to measure her room before she bought her chest of drawers! Being able to measure is definitely a vital skill to have. We have been measuring the height of our friends, curved objects, the perimetre of tops of tables, and even the circumference of our friends heads!

In PE, we started playing cricket! The first lesson was all about being a cool catcher, and all of us were rewarded with a 'cool catcher' sticker to celebrate our hard work on the first day back. We have been given a little booklet, we can collect our stickers here as well as reflect on what we did well and what we would like to improve on next time. This will be good for skill progression and we are excited for week two's PE.

In History, we have been learning about Native Americans. This links in to term 3's topic of North America and we are therefore able to link our prior knowledge. We looked at the importance of the Buffalo, and the Native American's way of life. This means we looked at what the Buffalo's purpose was, the food that Native American's ate, the clothes they wore, and the homes they lived in. These were called tipis. We are excited to continue learning about Native Americans, because in English we will be writing a non-chronological report on this topic. We are currently in the process of learning the features of a non-chronological report and looking at an example text, which we call a WAGOLL (What A Good One Looks Like).

Check back in week two to continue our term 4 learning journey with us!