Friday, 17 October 2008

17.10.08

Last week
Kara - star of the week - fantastic art work
Singer of the week - Alex Millard
Jessica Edwards and Cheeney Sheppard got their Blue Badges and Alec Knight got his Red badge
This week
Monkey to Elena for achieving Challenge 1 Maths Badge
Well done to Jude Noon - Blue Badge and Max Tryfonos - Red Badge
This week we have been doing our writing project working from Traditional Fairy stories. First of all we drew a story map with characters and places on it. I hope the parents who came today enjoyed the games we played. Today Year 3 wrote some very potent spells for the wicked witch. Some examples were - to make you strong, wicked, naughty and to make a rainbow.
We have been partitioning and ordering numbers in maths.
Adding two digit and two digit numbers together and we are going to work on subtraction using a number line and adding on next week. We are learning some songs from Oliver. It is lovely to hear that some of the children are singing them at home!
I hope the weather holds and you have an enjoyable weekend.

Friday, 3 October 2008

3rd October 2008

Hurrah! Blog working again I hope.
Star of the week Cheeney Sheppard
fantastic artist and mathematician!
We have been researching more about the Victorians through a video about a young girl's life. Year 3 remembered all of it so do ask them about Maggie at school, working as a maid, working in the factory and working as a photographer.
We have taken a photo of the class which copies the photo we found of a Victorian class at Luckwell - hope to get it on the blog!
We have been working hard at our number bonds,
multiplying, partitioning numbers, doubling and halving - anyone wishes to learn some techniques for tables will be happy to show you after school next Thursday.
We have been drawing portraits of ourselves and learning how to draw in proportion ears, noses eyes and a mouth!
We have been looking at circuits in Science.
A very busy week as well as composing our own street seller songs!
In Literacy we have been comparing playscripts and prose and learning the wonderful story Rumplestiltskin.
Have a good weekend and I hope everyone smiles as it's smile day today!

Friday, 12 September 2008

Week 1 8th - 12th September

star of the week - Thea Barnett-Trenear
Lion - Chloe Yeo
We have had a very busy week getting used to all the new routines.
We have learnt how to play on the new agility trail and love it, we have started playing the recorder - lovely tone! We have used capital letters in our writing, we have looked at Victorian artefacts and discussed them, we have done lots of counting circle games and learnt how to partition numbers, we have written a fact file and practised our handwriting.
Spellings this week - first three must learn - second could learn and third is the challenge.We have learnt to do our brain gym and Eurthmy!
We are looking forward to next week.

Friday, 5 September 2008

We have had a wonderful start to the school new year.
They all look so smart in their uniforms.
We have written our school contract.
We have created pivtures for our morning verse poem and learnt how to do Euruthmy! Actions using vowel sounds!
We written down what we are looking forward to this year - swimming being the most popular!
We do have a class photo - will be with you as soon as Scott sorts out my blog.
Thank you to parents who supported their children's research into the Victorians - fantastic archives.
Really looking forward to next week.
P.E. is on Monday and Thursday.

Saturday, 26 July 2008

Good-bye Year 3

We had a very hectic week, especially as everything needed to be packed in the classroom, ready for Mrs Christmas to take over Year 3 next year. It was lovely seeing her at the Leavers' Concert. Everyone in Year 6 did so well with her guidance.
In our class we all made a book each to leave as a present for next year's class to read. We had such fun writing them and did our best to use all the skills we'd learnt during the year, making them look professional.
We also thought of the changes ahead and how good Year 4 will be.
We had a great time at our Teddy Bears Picnic. So much delicious food to eat - thanks to our mums and dads.
So the it's the last day of Year 3. Time to play with our friends and share a fun day. 'Goodbyes and thank-yous' to everyone who has helped us so much. We made cards for them all.

A short message from me to say a big thank-you to those children who gave me cards and gifts. They were beautiful and very much appreciated. The messages really touched me. Thank-you all very much.
Enjoy a wonderful holiday everyone.
Mrs Hunt

Friday, 18 July 2008

Authors, mysteries and next year!

We have been watching a great video this week. It's really inspired us in our own writing as it's ghostly and creepy, but has great characters too.
We are all busy writing an extended story to leave in the class for next year's Year 3 to enjoy. We're doing our very best writing and producing the covers on the computer so it's like a real published book.
We have a variety of settings - some abroad!!
We're trying to use all we've learnt about writing this year as well as our own imagination. Hope you enjoy them next year Year 2!

Today is Swap Day when we all move up to our new classes for the morning to meet our new teacher and see our new rooms. "It felt different!" said Steven, when he returned.

A message from Mrs Hunt
Dear Children,
I do hope you all have a lovely time in your new class and you're able to continue to be enthusiastic learners in all the years ahead. Good luck to everyone.

Friday, 4 July 2008

Fountain Photographs and Interviews / Egypt Challenge

It seems our fountain project has been discovered by the media.
Kiera here. We had to stand by the fountain and we had to put our hand under the water as it shot up. Just as I did it the wind blew and I got soaked. My photograph was taken any way and I can't wait to see if its used in the TES.

Emma here. I was interviewed by a lady who asked me how the fountain worked. I had to stand by the fountain and try and touch the water as she took my photograph. We also had to jump on the sensors to the water went higher or lower. It was fantastic fun.

We are also thinking of an area of the subject of Ancient Egypt to research and present to the class. We may make a play, a poster, a poem or film as long as it tells the rest of the class about the subject.

Sam B here. As part of our challenge about Egypt I am making a poster about the pyramids. I've done some research to find out how they were built. The got loads of stone and added them in layers in the the shape of a square based pyramid. inside were amazing tunnels leading to a Pharaoh's tomb.

Everyone in Year 3 is excited about tomorrow's fete and the Fountain launch next Wednesday.

Friday, 27 June 2008

SATS and More!

A lot of children found they really had to use their critical thinking skills when doing SATS this week.
"I thought the maths was a mixture of hard and easy work. I could work most of it out though and think I did all right." (Erik)
"I thought the writing was interesting. I wrote a long piece of work." (Abigail)
"I found it a bit hard because the questions were difficult. I think I did well, as I did my best." (Joshua)
"When we did maths on Tuesday, I think I got all of the maths sums right
because I used all the strategies I'd learnt during the year. (Sam B)

In our class this week, we've also been thinking about team work. We heard a story about some giants who forgot the useful skills of Knee-high Nigel. They forgot how clever he was because he was small. He forgot he needed their strength to build his castles.
After hearing the story, we got into groups to see if we could work as a team. Some of us found it was quite hard.
Sam D worked with his group to make a robot. "We made a plan, chose which bit we were going to do, and made a robot out of multilink. We were proud of it in the end."
Emma enjoyed making a castle. "It was bit messy on your hands, but the end result was really good."
"Our group (Joshua talking) made models of the giants in the story and Knee-high Nigel. It made us think about size isn't as important as what you do in a team."
Abbie says, "Working in a team taught me that not everyone can get their own way or what they want to do, but the end result is better if we share ideas."
Do come and see what we made. There are photographs, but we still have trouble putting them on the blog!

Friday, 20 June 2008

Maths, Story Openers and Art

In Year 3 we've been concentrating on using all our maths skills to solve problems. 'Maths Man' has been inspiring us.
We also enjoyed solving Reese's Riddle (see Y4 Blog).
Hope it's helped our thinking skills!!
We've also been reading an adventurous story. You'll find it in the library as a play if you want to. It's called Tom and the Smugglers of Mourne.
It made us think about how to write exciting story openers. If it's a good one, you want to find out what happens next. So we thought we'd have a go.
Mrs Hunt brought in an atmospheric picture of the Suspension Bridge by the River Avon to inspire us.It was a night time picture.

Here are Holli and Erik's story openers which they have written for you to continue if you'd like to:-

The Monster of the Gorge
One dark night the water of the Avon Gorge rose higher than normal.
I, Henry Williams, asked my older brother if he wanted to go blackberry picking and take the camcorder.
Ben said, "Yes".
So we got there and suddenly we saw a mysterious light glowing in the water.
So we videoed it.
Very slowly it rose out the water.
We fainted.........
The Mystery of the Avon Gorge
One mysterious night it felt like someone was watching me as I walked along the river bank.
But I just carried on walking. Then I looked in the water and I saw lots of ripples. Suddenly I heard a spooky sound tap tap tap and there was something green reflected in the water........
While we are on the subject of atmosphere, in art we have been exploring colours and how they are connected to mood. We thought about colours which were happy, sad, hot and cold. We all made an Egyptian Landscape in one colour. Only the shade of it changed. Come and see what you think of them!!

Friday, 13 June 2008

Poetry, Pyramids, Puzzles and Sports Day....Hooray!

Hello it's Alice here....We listened to lots of lovely poems.
We wrote some of our own.
But what I liked doing best
Was reading one into the microphone.
(It was about Dinosaurs and it was funny!!)

Hi It's Sam Barnes here. We wrote poems acrostic poems about our Dads to celebrate Fathers Day.This is mine:-
Fantastic father
Amazing dad
Terrific Father
Happy as ever
Eating all the time
Really funny.
(Have a great day Dad!)

Samuel Dorrington here.....
On the subject of Fathers Day, we wanted to make something special for our wonderful Dads. We made pyramids (Still learning about Egypt) and Mrs Hunt thought as our Dads are such heroes looking after us so well we'd be like the Egyptians and hide something inside for you. Hope you like it.

Abbie Maker talking..... I decorated my pyramid with drums as my Dad is in a band, football as he plays it and a big heart. I put a message on the base.

Alfie here... In maths we've been improving our skills by solving problems and doing maths puzzles. I was amazed I could do quite hard sums by thinking of facts I already knew. I got all the answers right. Here's one for you.....Use all the numbers 1-9 and place them on a 3 by 3 grid so the difference between each neighbouring number vertically and horizontally is odd. Ask me if you need help.

Friday, 6 June 2008

Sport Week and other news!

It has been brilliant fun in Year 3 this week. We started the week with a 'Wake up and Shake' assembly and we found some of the actions quite difficult. By the end of the week after plenty of practise some of us were really good. It is good for our brains as well as our bodies - so well worth remembering.
Country Dancing was great too. A big thank -you for all friends and families who joined us.
It was fun doing rounders, athletics and more sports on Wednesday afternoon, but we were a little disappointed that Sports day itself had to be postponed because the weather forecast said it would most likely rain.
We did lots of good things in the classroom though. Come and see some of them!
We also have thought a little more about Ancient Egypt and now we have a new projector have enjoyed watching some excellent videos on the subject.
And lastly a message from Mrs Hunt.......
I expect some of you will have read in this week's newsletter that I shall be retiring in September - a few weeks into the new term.
I know I shall miss you all very much, but am pleased how well you you are doing, and am sure, if you work as hard in the future, you will all
have a brilliant time ahead.
So I'm hoping my last few weeks with this Year 3 will be the best ever!!

Friday, 23 May 2008

Tasty!!

Apart from reading and writing poetry our highlight of the week has been tasting the recipes we'd created using couscous as a basic ingredient.
We added a variety of foods to it, some sweet and some savoury and decided which was our favourite. Tom's was the most popular with strawberries and grated chocolate as his main ingredients. Everyone ticked the 'delicious' box and said it was 10 out of 10!!
We also gave our first performance of Year 3's Water Music to Years 4 and 5 as they may be able to programme our fountain so it is in harmony with the music. Thanks to Mr Humphrey for his in-put to help us improve our playing.
We also thought about our future ambitions after thinking about the kinds of places people work and the jobs they do there. Nearly all the jobs we chose will need lots of hard work, as lots of qualifications will be necessary for us to achieve our ambitions.
Several of the boys decided they wanted to be footballers. Football has been in the news very much this week and many of our class are off to Wembley tomorrow to support Bristol City in their effort to gain promotion. (Let's hope everyone returns feeling happy.)
Have a brilliant week off everyone!

Saturday, 17 May 2008

Creating music and recipes

Another busy week in Year 3!!
We've all been thinking about our Year 6 and wishing them well in their SATS.
This week our focus in Literacy has been on writing instructions. So we've been doing lots of reading and writing of instructions. We've thought about our favourite games and our favourite food. We've read cookery books and each written our own menu, which we made into a class book.
We also have designed our own recipes and chosen the ones we would like to try out next week. We will let you know whether they tastesd good or not!!
We have started to think about the special event planned to launch the Fountain. Our class is hoping to play some music we will have composed. To inspire us we listened to Handel's Water Music. We got to know it very well.
Then we tried out our own ideas.
We wanted to use percussion instruments as well as chime bars and recorders. We also decided to keep to a simple rhythm. We wanted to have the softness and gentleness of dripping water and the powerful effect of a torrent of water in our composition. It wasn't easy and when we recorded it we could see there was a lot we can learn from our efforts!! Perhaps you'll be at the launch and may see us play.

Friday, 9 May 2008

Hard maths!!

We have been trying hard with our maths this week, particularly using our skills to do harder calculations. We found out it's quite important to keep work neat and columns straight so we don't mix up our hundreds, tens and ones!!
Some of us are brilliant at new challenges, but others can get confused. Our class star of the week showed us the importance of stickability.
We found out even more about Ancient Egypt this week. One of our Guided Reading books had an interesting article about the food they ate. We found it hard to imagine life without supermarkets. But imagine what it was like to be paid with food instead of money!
We also are finding things about the subject everywhere. Holli bought the class a picture of Queen Nefertiti. She saw it at a car boot sale and it cost 50p. Strangely our Big book told us our the Ancient World inspired art today - and this was a good example.
We finished our own pictures of Artefacts produced using brusho and wax crayon. You must visit our classroom and look at them as we seem unable to put the photographs on our blog.
Also don't forget to visit the Art Trail this weekend. Everyone has worked so hard and the quality of work is very good.

Friday, 2 May 2008

More about Ancient Egypt (and dancing)

We have really started to become Egyptologists this week. We have collected an amazing number of resources to help us find out more. They range from books, models, pictures on papyrus, jig-saw puzzles, post-cards and photographs. Each and everyone has fascinated and interested us.
We became newspaper reporters imagining what might have been written in the newspaper on the day Tutankhamen's tomb was discovered by Howard Carter. Imagine our delight to then go on the internet and see a film taken on that day.
Learning about all the items in that tomb has developed our understanding of the beliefs and lives of the Ancient Egyptians.
We have loved reading all the books and learning how people were made into mummies after they died.
We have done other interesting things too. We observed how some foods melt when heated in our science lesson. Not all our predictions were right.
We also started to learn the steps of the country dances for our May Celebration!!
So another busy week in Year 3. We are all looking forward now to a long weekend!

Friday, 4 April 2008

Words, words and more words!

We have had a very busy week in Year 3 because it's the last week and time to find out how much we've learned this term.
We tried very hard in maths as there was a lot to remember! Some of us knew all the answers, but not everyone finds maths easy.
We also wrote about our favourite toys using as many descriptions as we could. It was fun because we could play with them when we'd finished our writing!
Everyone worked hard to become better at spelling. We played lots of word games, had quizzes in teams and tried to think of the most challenging words we could learn ourselves and then ask other teams if they knew them!!
We had to see how many 2 letter words we could list in 30 seconds, 3 letter words in 45 seconds, 4 letter words in a minute etc. We had beginnings of words to find endings for, played scrabble and lots more things. It was great fun as well as helping us learn those tricky words we sometimes forget!! Hopefully at the end of the week we'll remember some of the words we met.
We also learned more about team work in PE. This week each team devised a game to teach the
rest of the class. It was brilliant seeing everyone have a go playing the games we'd made up. Ask Year 3 how you play 'stack the bean bag' or 'spider ball'!
However, the highlight of our week was the count down for the Fountain to be used with water for the first time. It was wonderful seeing all the work of so many people come to fruition. Let's hope it will be a feature of Luckwell School for many years to come!!
Have a great holiday everyone!

Friday, 28 March 2008

Recent Activities

We have been working hard at finding out more about shape and direction in our maths work. We found out all about turning and what is a right angle turn. We enjoyed drawing 'Right Angle' Robots to remind us what a right angle looks like. We tried to include as many right angles in our pictures as we could.
We used shapes in our egg designs for our Easter cards. We used the computer to make them and wrote verses as part of our Literacy work. We thought a lot about 'The Easter Story' and what we can learn from it today.
Since Easter we have been practising our Poetry Reading. We've loved reciting 'Raps' and found different ways to use our voices, so we could include the beat for which raps are so famous.
At the end of the week we recorded ourselves reciting a poem. We intend to listen to them next week and see how good they sound. So if you want to hear them you can ask to borrow the tape!!
In PE we were practising how to play games as a team. It was lots of fun too, but we found out how important it is to 'play fair'.

Monday, 10 March 2008

We have been busy painting our clay models of Rainforest Animals.
We have also been looking at how the environment is changed by human activity. We drew landscapes and added litter, buildings and other examples of what we do to the world.
It was quite sad to see our beautiful landscapes change, but it made us understand how we can make our local area worse by things we do.

Friday, 29 February 2008

Mothers' Day

We've been thinking critically in our class this week. We thought about how information is presented to us. That made us think about the sort of words used in adverts.
We decided to think of all the qualities ours mums have. How would we write an advert for them? Lots of words came into our minds... wonderful, loving, caring, clever, beautiful ....were just a few. It was agood reminder to spend a bit of time making them a special card for Mothers' Day this Sunday.

Tuesday, 5 February 2008


We have been learning all about the Rainforest.
Everyone chose an animal and had found out about it. We made a picture of it. Then we created a mural with lots of trees. We decided in which part of the Rainforest each animal would live.
This is the end result. It really brightens up our classroom.