Croeso i Flwyddyn Tri

Teacher: Miss Powell

P.E. days - Tuesday and Thursday (please come to school in P.E. kit)

Forest School - Friday afternoon, alternate weeks (beginning 15.09.23)

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Class update

Summer 2024

22.4.24-3.5.24 

Last week we enjoyed outdoor learning week, taking part in lots of activities in our outdoor areas. We wrote poetry inspired by nature, looked for shapes in the natural environment and used our artistic skills to sketch a landscape. We also carried out investigations to see how fast we are compared to different animals and to explore solar energy as an alternative power source. This week in literacy, we have started to look at our new text ‘Leon and the Place Between’ (we are only looking at the first half for now...so please no spoilers!) We created and drew our own imagined ‘Place Between’, and we will use this to write a continuation of the story over the coming weeks. In maths we have been measuring volume and capacity through practical activities. We have also really enjoyed using the microbits, writing code to display a series of pictures and creating a musical tune. Very impressive work, da iawn pawb! Have a lovely weekend all. 

8.4.24-19.4.24 

We’ve had a busy first few weeks back in Year 3, finishing up our All Creatures Great and Small topic. We have explored how living things depend on each other for survival by looking at food chains, finding out what producers, consumers and decomposers are. In Literacy we have been learning to write kennings – a way of describing something without actually saying what it is – based on Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon poetry. We then used this to write a poem about an animal – some of us even challenged ourselves to write about more than 1 animal, or to create a verse to represent each stage of a food chain. When we were happy with our kenning poem, we used our ICT skills to present our work online in a collaborative document. In Maths we have continued our work on time, moving on to calculating the duration between a given start and finish time, and working out a start or finish time based on how long something lasts. We have been also practising lots of our Big Maths skills – such as multiplying by 10 and working out missing parts to 100 - to keep these on the boil. We worked collaboratively in P.E. to plan our own circuit training activities using various equipment, thinking about effective exercises to keep our heart rate up for the whole time. W enjoyed our Commando Joe’s session this week, where we had to work together to retrieve photographic evidence from the poacher’s camp to complete our Mountain Gorilla rescue mission. 

Spring 2024

11.3.24-22.3.24 

Once again, I am amazed how much we have managed to squeeze into a short half term! We are all so proud of the children’s performance during our Easter play, as I’m sure you are, and they thoroughly enjoyed performing for you. Thank you for all your hard work in helping them to learn their lines, and to practise delivering them confidently and with expression. We also enjoyed taking part in lots of collaborative activities for World Book Day – problem solving, designing a new book and sharing our favourite stories – and Comic Relief, where we designed Lego habitats for different creatures. We were lucky enough to be joined by Technocamps last week, who helped us to build and program our own Lego robots – we’ve got the coding bug, and look forward to doing more of this in class! In Literacy, the children have begun to create a fact file for a creature of their choice. It has been fascinating to hear all of the facts they are finding, and I am really excited to read their finished work. In Maths we have been learning to tell the time on both analogue and digital clocks. We started by practising o’clock, half past, quarter past and quarter to, before moving on to reading and showing 5-minute intervals. Linked to our topic, we have been finding out more about how living things depend on each other to survive. We learnt about producers, consumers and decomposers, and explored how different creatures are connected in food chains. We have also been learning new vocabulary in Welsh to classify and describe animals – I have been so impressed! I hope you all have a lovely Easter break, and that the spring sunshine makes an appearance. 

26.2.24-8.3.24  

Last week we enjoyed taking part in our whole school Eisteddfod. The children all worked extremely hard on their classwork entries, and it was really hard to choose a winner! I was very impressed with all the entries from home as well, so diolch yn fawr to you for your help. We have continued to work hard on our Easter play, and the children are becoming a lot more confident with their lines and actions. In Literacy, we have been working on developing our creative writing skills, using different sentence openers in our retelling of the legend of Dinas Emrys, and beginning to use a variety of techniques, such as similes and using our senses, to build our descriptions. We have been working on measuring in Maths, choosing which unit of measurement is appropriate for different objects and practising measuring accurately using rulers and measuring tapes. We have also started to convert between units of measurement – e.g. from metres to centimetres, so that we could compare lengths. We used these skills in Forest School to find out the lengths of different objects and had to think carefully about how we could measure a huge log (over 8 metres!) using just one metre stick. Our latest Commando Joe’s mission saw us working in teams to retrieve evidence from the poacher’s zone without being detected. We needed to do lots of strategising to avoid being caught! 

5.2.24-23.2.24

In Maths over the last few weeks, we have continued our work on fractions. We have become really confident representing fractions in different ways, pictorially and using concrete resources, and finding fractions of amounts. I was also blown away by how easily the children got the hang of adding and subtracting fractions with the same denominator – amazing work! In Literacy we have continued reading Charlotte’s Web, practising using different sentence openers to make our writing more exciting and using our sense to build descriptions. The children have been super creative when designing a mask to represent their chosen animal and we are can’t wait to make them. If you have any materials you would be happy to donate – feathers, fabric, pipe cleaners etc. – we would be extremely grateful! We are really enjoying our Commando Joe’s sessions, and have been carrying out different missions to help save a mountain gorilla. The activities can be tricky at times, but I am really impressed with how the children are developing their teamwork, resilience, respect, and communication. We have restarted reading buddies, and look forward to sharing stories with our friends in Year 1 every week. This week we have been hard at work preparing for our Eisteddfod. We are using our creative writing skills to retell the story of Merlin and the Dragons, as well as learning a Welsh song to perform. Using photographs as inspiration, we have started to create our own pencil sketch of a Welsh castle. There is still time to complete homework entries for the following: ICT: Use ICT to produce a poster that advertises Wales and the Welsh language Photography: Produce a landscape photograph that reflects Wales/Welsh culture Art: Welsh dragon collage or a dragon sketch. 

22.1.24-2.2.24

In Year 3 we have been practising reading and comprehending a text. After looking for clues in Charlotte’s Web and doing some independent research we deduced that Charlotte is a barn spider. We have been busy planning a non-chronological report using the skills we learnt before Christmas so that we can share all of the wonderful information that we found. We also really enjoyed taking part in a live session with the author Steven Camden – we helped to create characters, setting and plot for a story, and then used the processes Steven shared with us to collaboratively our own story worlds in class. In Welsh, we have been learning how to name and classify different animals, using the language pattern ‘Pa fath o anifail ydy…? Mae … ydy … See if your child can remember these at home! On January 25th we celebrated Dydd Santes Dwynwen. We read the story and watched a short animation, before deciding which facts were true and which were false. We also had a go at making origami hearts – very tricky, but we persevered and had some great results! In Maths we have been developing our understanding of fractions. We found out how to find an equivalent fraction by multiplying or dividing the numerator and denominator by the same number, then moved on to adding fractions. This was really easy, as long as we remembered the golden rule that we do not add the denominators! We have been exploring the life cycles of different animals to find out about the main stages, comparing them to find any similarities and differences. In Expressive Arts we have continued our All Creatures Great and Small topic with designing an animal mask. We are looking forward to coming up with a final design and making our mask using lots of different materials. If you have anything at home that we could use – scraps of material, feathers, card etc. – we would be extremely grateful! Our second Commando Joe session saw us working in teams to transport our rescued mountain gorilla across a lake. We had some very creative ideas, but this was a very tricky mission to complete! Communication and teamwork skills are developing well, however, and I look forward to seeing this continue.

8.1.24-19.1.24

Happy New Year, and welcome back! We have got off to a great start with our new topic All Creatures Great and Small, within the whole school topic Wonders of the Earth. To begin with we found out about the 7 life processes common to all living things, using the acronym MRS GREN to help us to remember. Then we moved on to exploring lifecycles of living things, looking at similarities and differences between them. In ICT we are starting to learn how to use and create branching databases, which we will use later in the term to sort and classify living things. In Literacy we are reading the novel Charlotte’s Web. This week we have carried out research about different spiders around the world to see if we could determine what species Charlotte is. We have thought about the changing thoughts and feelings of characters as we move through the story, and are enjoying getting to know more about the characters. This term in Maths we have been developing our understanding of fractions and finding parts of a shape or amount. We have used practical resources to share into groups, before moving on to finding fractions involving more than one part. Our times table knowledge has really helped us, so please carry on learning these at home! We enjoyed our first Commando Joe’s session of the new term, working in groups to devise a way to safely rescue a mountain gorilla from an infested swamp! We really had to focus on communicating clearly with each other, working effectively as a team and collaborating to be successful. Some very interesting ideas and designs! So that we can continue to make the most of our outside areas even during this colder weather, please ensure your child has appropriate clothing every day in school. Diolch yn fawr. 

27.11.23-8.12.23

We have had an extremely busy couple of weeks, and Christmas has well and truly begun! To start the week, we discussed as a class all the things we have to be thankful for at this time of year, and also thought about those who are less fortunate than us. We then wrote and decorated our ideas to add to our school gratitude tree – I was so impressed by how thoughtful and mature the children’s contributions were. In Literacy, we have been working on non-chronological reports. The children identified the different features and looked for examples in various texts. We then started researching Christmas around the world, looking for similarities and differences between different countries, ready to write our own report next week. We have continued to work on multiplication in Maths, and we are all now really confident multiplying whole numbers by 10. Next week we will be using the Maths skills we have developed so far this year to help us calculate costings for our Enterprise project. To finish our ‘I Am the One and Only’ topic, the children were keen to have a go at creating self-portraits. We started by looking at examples of self-portraits by famous artists, including Picasso and Frida Kahlo, and thinking about different materials and techniques used. We had a go at drawing a portrait of our partner using guidelines and measurements to help us get the position and proportions of facial features correct, then tried a split-face portrait of ourselves. This was not as easy as we thought, so needed lots of perseverance, resilience, and attention to detail to get it right. The children had a fantastic time building and testing out their own fitness trails at Forest School, showing great collaboration and teamwork. Finally, we have been working hard on some Christmas crafts which we hope you will really enjoy when they come home! 

24.11.23

We started the fortnight by taking part in an anti-bullying week live lesson, after which we thought about how we could celebrate differences, accept other people, and make a noise about bullying. We continued this in our Literacy lessons, where we looked at how the BFG was bullied by the other giants, and discussed the difference between physical and verbal bullying. We then worked in groups to role-play how we could act in different scenarios. At the end of the week we had a lovely day in our pyjamas celebrating Children in Need. The children worked through a carousel of activities including writing about inspirational adults in our lives, creating a Children in Need themed acrostic poem, and learning how to draw Pudsey. We also completed our run Pudesy, with an amazing 97 laps completed between us – a fantastic effort everybody!  

This week we recognised World Children’s Day. We thought about the rights of the child, working in groups to discuss a selection of the 42 articles and diamond rank them in order of which we thought we were most important. We also created some amazing blue-themed art, colour mixing to make our own unique colours, and thinking carefully about shade and tone in our masterpiece.   

We have continued our work on multiplication and division in Maths, using resources to physically group and share objects before moving on to writing sums accurately. Our Samba drumming is coming along well, with us all playing different rhythm patterns confidently as part of a group, and we have enjoyed exploring how to make different characters move at the same time on Scratch. 

10.11.23

Welcome back – hopefully you all enjoyed a well-deserved week off and are rested and recharged ready for another busy half term! 

In Literacy before the break, we completed our work based on After the Fall. We explored a character's thoughts and feelings through drama activities, and used our wellbeing work to come up with some advice that we would give to Humpty Dumpty. We worked on developing our writing by using different sentence openers, and uplevelling and improving sentences in different ways, then put our skills into practice to write a retell of the story. Following this the children worked in pairs to create a stop-frame animation of part of the story – they needed to make a character, create the backdrop and plan using a storyboard, before taking a series of photographs using careful layering to put together the animation. So many different skills involved, and it was tricky at times, but the children were so supportive of each other and showed great perseverance and resilience. This week, we have been finding out about Remembrance Day. We have researched and made notes on what we read, then put together an information page to share what we have learned in a creative way. We have also explored poetry, learning the features of Haikus then writing our own on the theme of Remembrance. Using different tutorials, we have crested our own poppy art with some really fantastic results. 

In Maths we have started to use different strategies to multiply numbers, and representing our multiplication in different ways – I have been so impressed with how quickly the children have picked this up. 

We are really enjoying our samba drumming sessions – we have continued exploring different musical elements, and putting together rhythm patterns to build a piece of music, and are looking forward to sharing this with you. 

20.10.23

Another busy couple of weeks in Year 3! In Literacy, we have been exploring After the Fall – the story of what happened to Humpty Dumpty after he got back up. The children have really enjoyed this, and recognise the important message of being resilient like Humpty Dumpty, getting back up and trying again when ‘accidents’ happen. We have been learning about different ways to start a sentence, using time, manner and place openers, and will use this next week to help us retell the story in our Star Write. We found out how to talk about some of our hobbies in French, learning the vocabulary for some activities and starting to give our opinion about it. 

This fortnight in Maths we have continued our work on addition, moving on to using column addition and adding numbers with an exchange. Very impressive work from everybody, so da iawn pawb! We then moved on to using our skills to solve word problems and reasoning questions. Following our Harvest celebration last week, we have explored the Jewish festival of Sukkot, thinking about similarities and differences between the two. The children have been working in pairs to design and build their own model sukkah, a key part of Jewish beliefs – I wonder if your child can explain to you what it is and why it is significant! We have been learning how to create stop-frame animations, and are looking forward to putting our ICT skills into practice next week to have a go at being animators! 

We are extremely fortunate to be taking part in samba drumming sessions with Gwent Music throughout this term and have a great first couple of sessions. We started by learning some simply rhythms by playing different clapping games, and found out about some of the instruments used in a samba. We explored the different sounds they make, then had a go at putting all of this together to start learning a piece. We cannot wait to perform for you! 

6.10.23

In Year 3 we have been finding out more about our families and thinking about how they are all different. We have explored new digital tools, using Adobe to create a family tree – I am so impressed with how quickly the children have picked this up, the enthusiasm they have shown, and the fantastic way they have supported each other and figured things out together. We continued this in our Welsh sessions, learning the key vocabulary to talk about people in our family. In Literacy we have been recapping our understanding of how to write effective instructions. We identified key features, such as imperative verbs, time connectives and adverbs, and discussed why each is important in instructions. We have linked this to algorithms in ICT, recognising that they are sets of instructions to program a device to solve a problem or complete a task. We have spent some time this week thinking about our feelings, after reading the brilliant ‘Find Your Happy’. We discussed how we can recognise different feelings, and the children gave lots of thought things they can do to manage their emotions, as well as ways they could help someone else to feel better. 

This week in Maths we have worked on adding and subtracting. We have built our understanding of what happens when we add or subtract 1s, 10s or 100s to or from a 3-digit number, and are ready to move on to adding larger numbers next week. During P.E. we have enjoyed playing different games to develop our teamwork and communication, and had great fun designing and teaching other our own games. 

22.9.23

We have had a brilliant start to the new term in Year three. The children have settled really well and are getting used to new expectations and routines.

In Literacy, we have been recapping work on writing instructions. We identified key features and practised using time openers to put our instructions in the correct order, and also thought about why adverbs are useful. We linked this to our digital learning, finding about algorithms before writing our own and testing them with a friend. We then had to ‘debug’ our algorithm if the end result wasn’t what we hoped for.

We have been learning to recognise and name colours in French, and have worked in pairs to ask and answer basic questions to see how much Welsh we have remembered over the holidays.

Our Maths learning over the last few weeks has focused on place value – we have been working with numbers up to 1000 and are becoming confident representing and partitioning these in different ways. We have also carried out baseline assessments in Big Maths, as well as practising our times table facts and number bonds for quick recall.

As part of our topic ‘I am the One and Only’ the children have been finding out more about their family (many thanks to you for your help with this at home!) and have started to use our technology skills to create our family tree digitally. We created an ‘all about me’ silhouette filled with things that represent us, and have enjoyed sharing with each other to find out about our different interests and what makes us unique. Last week we had a fantastic time at Forest School, where the children collaborated with others in Year two to complete a nature scavenger hunt. It was great to be able to explore the forest and we look forward to looking out for all the differences we notice in the environment as the seasons change.