Mrs Smith Year 3 - Puffins

Hello and welcome to the Puffins class blog page.

Here is where you can touch base and check out all of the exciting activities we are getting up to in year 3. We will keep you updated as we continue our learning journey and can't wait to share all of our successes and achievements with you all. 

Which adults are in Puffins class?

Mrs Smith - Class teacher

Mrs McHugh - Teaching assistant

TERM SIX - FOOD AND FARMING

Dust off those wellies, grab your fork and dig in as we learn all about where our food comes from. Discover the different types of farming and follow our food from farm to fork. You will explore the nutritional value in seasonal foods and don your chef’s hat as you plant, harvest and cook delicious delicacies from scratch. How has farming changed from the Iron Age to the present day? What type of farmer would you be? Let's plough in and find out!

 English- In reading, we shall finish Charlotte’s Web before using the non-fiction text, “The Farm that feeds us” by Nancy Castaldo. In writing, we shall use the influence of Pie Corbett in our poetry before writing an explanation text about plant growth before writing letters to persuade.

 Maths – Following on from last term, we will continue to learn to tell the time. We will be looking at converting seconds to minutes and we will use our time telling skills to help us read and understand timetables. We will also be focusing on shape; making our own shapes practically, identifying the properties of 2D and 3D shapes and identifying shapes in different orientations. Finally to end the year, we will be learning about statistics where we interpret and create our own graphs.

Today, Tuesday 6th June, we took a trip to Sacrewell Farm. This was to tie in with our learning about food, farming and plants. Sacrewell Farm is an organic farm where they showed us the whole farming cycle through a series of three workshops. The first showed us what was growing in the garden and we had the opportunity to identify plants before planting some seeds, then we investigated the power of poo! Discovering how the food that the sheep and goats eat on the farm comes out the other end and all gets cultivated back into the soil to help provide nutrients for the plants to grow. Finally, we took a tractor tour of the whole farm, which was very bumpy! It was a fantastic day and as you can see from the final pictures - some of us were pretty exhausted!

Term 4 and 5 – Shake, Rattle and Roll

 We are brave, powerful warriors, and we will meet in battle! This topic, will focus upon the Romans and how they changed Britain. Using different source materials, we’ll investigate the Roman Empire and the impact they made upon Britain, especially in the local area. We will learn about where the Roman Empire was established and compare the human and physical geographical features of Italy and Britain as well as looking at Mother Nature’s awesome energies as they hiss and roar deep within the Earth. Plates collide, spewing lava. Rocks rain down and mud slides in torrents. Towns and cities vanish under ashen clouds. Discover the dangerous and ferocious world of natural disasters and glimpse the savage and deadly effects of Mount Vesuvius.

English – In Reading, we will finish off “Varjak Paw” before linking in our History and Geography work by using “Escape from Pompeii” then the non-fiction text “Meet the Ancient Romans”. In writing, we shall continue with some performance poetry before writing diaries and recounts around the events in Pompeii. Finally we shall begin to look at the narrative of “ Charlotte’s Web”.

Maths – In Maths, we will be continuing our measurement however this time turning our attention to length and perimeter. We will be looking at accurate use of a ruler to measure to the nearest cm and half cm as well as, making sensible estimates. Furthermore, we will learn how to find the perimeter of shapes and using this to help a fictional Roman Emperor to find the size of his rooms in his new villa! We shall then look at mass and capacity and to finish this term, we will introduce time.

This week, we have continued practising our printing skills following Bryan Nash Gill's influence. Today we used leaves to print with. The effect looks incredible.

Once again, it has been a busy week. However, we managed to squeeze in a little gardening where we prepared our planter and planted some bean seeds. We can not wait to watch them grow!

This week, the focus has been on wellbeing. Each day, we have focused on one area of wellbeing and have completed activities around this. We have completed a circuits physical activity, kindness tokens, considered how to calm our anger plus a mindfulness session. We finished the week by swapping half the class with Year 5 and making friendship bracelets together. We also tied this into our poetry writing where we created Wellbeing Box poems based on Kit Wright's The Magic Box Poem. We also managed to squeeze in a fruit monster competition and try some healthy fruits. 

Welcome back to Term 5 where the Romans have been in school...

Today, Wednesday 19th April, we took part in a Roman Day where we became part of a roman legion. We practised marching in formation before making and then using our shields to make the protective turtle. We also looked at different artefacts before trying some food that the army would have eaten and making a mosaic. What a brilliant day!

Week Six

Using Starburst sweets, we pushed segments together to create sedimentary rock. Then we heated it to make metamorphic rocks.

Another busy week full of learning but we also managed to squeeze in a Science Day. Children were looking at plants. We created a plant whilst working as a team in a relay, carried out investigations into why leaves are green and how water is taken up a stem before making tree rubbings and pictures with leaves.

This week, it snowed! In amongst all the learning we were focusing on, we could not resist having a quick play out in it. Our faces soon became red, our fingers numb and our feet wet but we had a great time! 

We have had such a busy but exciting WBD today. Our focus text was Hair Love and we used the text to inspire our instruction writing and for creating our crazy hair collages. We also managed to squeeze into the day; a teacher swap - where Mrs Wayland came to read us The Stinky Cheeseman whilst Mrs Smith went to the Nursery to read to them, a zoom call with the author Emma Carrol, Reading time with parents and hot chocolate plus a book swap! We hope those that came enjoyed the day as much as us!

This week, we have been lucky enough to be visited by THREE inspirational people. On Monday, we met Emily who is going to be coaching us in cricket this term. On Thursday, we met Katie Stainton, a GB heptathlete with hopes to compete in forthcoming Olympics, who showed us how to develop our athletic skills. Finally, on Friday, adventurer James Ketchell returned to tell us all about his expedition to Greenland. What a trio of inspirational people!

Term 3 – Location, Location, Location

Buckle your seatbelt and hold on tight as we go on an epic adventure of discovery. Have you ever taken the time to appreciate the beauty of our environment or indeed the country in which we live? During this unit, we will learn about the many physical and human wonders that the United Kingdom holds and comparing it to a country in Eastern Europe. We shall use our developing compass skills and introduce the terms latitude and longitude. Toss aside your Sat Nav, brush up on your map skills as we journey around the continent of Eastern Europe. Where will we find our favourite ‘Location, Location, Location?’

 English – In reading this term we shall use the text “Varjak Paw” by S.F Said to develop our comprehension skills. In writing, we will investigate poems using adjectives and similes before focusing on “Mysterious Alleys” to develop our tension and suspense in writing paying particular attention to the plot within such narratives. Moving on with our year 3 English curriculum, we will continue to work on our use of fronted adverbials, noun phrases, adverbs and inverted commas.

Maths – This term, we will be continuing embedding our multiplication and division skills before moving into length and perimeter and fractions.

In DT today, we learnt how to use saws and the hot glue guns safely before we design our bridges. We also familiarised ourselves with creating working circuits as our bridges will have to include a light to warn vehicles of the opening bridge.

Today, in our DT work, we began learning about the Victorian engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and how his designs changed and defined the Victorian era. We looked at a variety of bridges and recognised what they used for strength. Then Mrs Smith set us a challenge! In groups, we had to build a free standing bridge using the knowledge we had gathered and a whole range of boxes, sellotape and scissors. That was it - nothing else. The results were interesting, as you can see. Some were successful, some less so but a brilliant learning opportunity as we begin our DT work on bridges.

Term 1 and 2 – Ancient Britain

 Take a moment to step outside and stand quietly and still. Turn off all your technology and try to forget the modern world. Imagine this place 5000 years ago. What would you have seen?

Experience life without modern tools and luxurious home comforts – would you survive? In our topic we will discover how people evolved from hunter gatherers to farmers and the beliefs these prehistoric warriors held. We will also investigate where and why humans settled in the places they made home and how some of these still exist in modern times.

English – During this unit, the children will explore poetry by creating acrostic and mesostic poems then later in term two, look at performance poetry. In Reading, we shall firstly use the non-fiction book “Find out about the Stone, Bronze and Iron ages “ to gather information about our topic as well as identify key features of non-fiction texts. We shall then be using Ted Hughes’ thrilling “The Iron Man” for both our reading and writing lessons. Through the exposure to this rich text, we shall be creating narrative as well as information texts and non-chronological reports. Children shall continue to build upon their writing skill such as, capital letters, full stops, conjunctions, fronted adverbials and apostrophes to name a few! They will then have the opportunity to apply this across the different genres of writing.

Maths – During this unit, we will be investigating the number system and ensuring our knowledge of place value is sound. We will look at the value of different numbers as well as attempting to order them and compare them. Following on from this, we will be recapping adding and subtraction practically before moving onto use of the formal column method. After, we will be focusing on multiplication and division where will be looking at different methods to calculate problems as well as continuing to gain confidence with our times tables.

We have looked at pointillism in Art this term through the work of Georges Seurat and Yayoi Kasuma. After experimenting with different paint types, we created our final piece showing Seahenge - a Bronze Age wooden circle found on a beach in Norfolk. We think they look dot-tastic!

This Wednesday, Sunita came to see us. She told us about the gods that Hindus worship and their importance in their everyday lives. It was very interesting looking at the pictures and seeing what each represented.

For Science Day on Wednesday, we were looking at materials and how they can change state. We took part in a variety of activities. We researched using the laptops about matters of state and presented our findings on powerpoints. We investigated different materials and their properties and we predicted what would happen to bread, cheese and chocolate when they were heated. We then carried out an experiment to see what happened.

We also considered what the Iron Man would be like if he were made of a different material. Would it have the same effect if it was the Glass Man ? or the Jelly Man?

It was fantastic fun, full of fun and learning.