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!