Year 3 Blog 2024/25

  English Week 4 This week, we have waved goodbye to our first topic, 'The Barnabus Project'. The children finished the unit by writing some fantastic descriptions of what Barnabus and his friends see when they escape to the above-ground world. Year three have shown us that they can use rich and powerful vocabulary to describe, as well as interesting adverbs to modify their verbs. Their writing has been nothing short of exciting to read. Please see some examples below...

 Each year the European day of Languages is celebrated on 26th September. Year 3 found out about German culture, food and some facts about Germany. They also located Germany on a map of Europe and had a go at pronouncing some greetings and counting in German. They then created a visual fact file of everything that they had found out.

In PSHE this week, Year 3 explored what it means to 'know' someone. We thought about different people that we 'know': friends, family, teachers, famous people, and so on, and we discussed what it means to know someone. The children learned that knowing someone online is different to knowing someone in 'real life'. To show our learning, we used a diagram to show who we know well and who we don't: Then, we all thought about which adults we trust most, who we can talk to if we are ever worried. We all made sure that we have 5 adults who keep us safe. Great work, Year 3!

This week, Year 3 learned about one of the most fascinating finds that archeologists have made in Britain: The Cheddar Man. Found in a cave in Cheddar, Somerset, 'The Cheddar Man' is the name given to a skeleton which was discovered in 1903. This is the oldest skeleton found in Britain, which belonged to a man in his 20s during the Mesolithic. The children learned that the skull of The Cheddar Man has a hole above the right eye. Year 3 used what they have already learned about the Stone Age to come up with clever theories to explain his mysterious injury. An accident while hunting? Wounded by a falling stalactite? Trepanning? For now, we just don't know! What we do know comes from DNA analysis. We learned that the Cheddar Man had dark skin, black, wavy hair and light blue or green eyes. Year 3 then had a go at creating their own 'artist's interpretation' of the evidence that we have.

This week, Year 3 have been looking at the importance of space and what it means in an isolated or game environment. We practiced movement with a few indoor warm-up games. When applying this skill to tag rugby, the children soon worked out that movement was key! They realised that being a moving target meant that there more space for teammates to use. 

 Music Week 4 In music, year 3 have still been exploring the musical vocabulary timbre and dynamics. We created a whole-class composition with layered sounds and we tried to capture the mood of three different pictures of clouds. We looked at the different ways in which we could structure our composition so that we could show changing and flowing dynamics and timbre, so as to create different moods throughout the same piece of music.  We also began looking at creating graphic scores and talking about how we can notate music by putting symbols onto paper. We will continue with this next week. 

  English Week 3  This week we have continued to talk about adverbs in English. We kicked off the week with a fun adverbs charades game, which year 3 loved. The task was to guess the action they were doing and how they were doing it. This was a fun way of consolidating their understanding of adverbs in preparation to use them in their writing.  Today, we have been applying what we have learnt about expanded noun phrases and adverbs over the last 3 weeks and using that knowledge to plan for a descriptive piece of writing next week. 

In history this week, we learned all of the vocabulary that we will need to understand Prehistoric Britain. Most importantly, we learned that prehistory means ‘before written records.’

  English Week 2 This week we continued our learning journey based on the book 'The Barnabus Project'. We started the week, by practising writing some expanded noun phrases. The children then did a piece of independent writing about their own idea of a perfect pet, which they had created last week. Finally, we finished the week by starting to look at adverbs and how they can be used to modify the verbs in a sentence and make our writing even more exciting!  

 Air - Music Our topic in music this half term is 'Air'. In week one, we explored the musical term 'pitch' and the children listened to a piece of music, identifying some dramatic changes in pitch. This week was week 2 and we explored the musical terminology 'timbre' and 'dynamics'. The children enjoyed exploring different types of percussion instruments and the different sounds that they could create. They composed some short pieces of music, all about a cloud. They performed their compositions and the rest of the class described the mood that they had created through their music, using the new musical vocabulary, timbre and dynamics.