Year 3

We had lots of fun last week meeting a visitor who had been living in a cupboard of 3CL for a very long time!

We learnt the names of the bones of the body and had fun labelling our own skeletons. All finished off with a skeleton dance!

We’ve had great fun this afternoon looking at cave paintings again. Today, we were looking at how people are represented in Stone Art art. We noticed that they are mostly portrayed as stick men. Leo suggested that this could be where the first drawing of a stick man cave from. We discussed why people weren’t drawn in great detail and we came to the conclusion that it could be because their brains weren’t as advanced as ours today!

We then spoke about the different activities and actions that Stone Age man would have taken part in – spear throwing, running, sitting around a camp fire etc. The fun part came when we used charcoal to have a go at creating our own stick men. We think that our attempts are fabulous!

Never believe that English and History are all reading and writing. This week we have been:

Re-enacting scenes from our wonderful English text, The First Drawing…

As well as having a true test of survival between bipedal and quadrupedal hominids. Whoever gathers the most fruit – SURVIVES! Can you guess who won?

Our Computing unit for this half term is branching databases.

We had lots of fun last week creating our own human branching databases. This week, we have had a go at sorting Stone Age animals into categories. We first looked at what makes a good question in a branching database. Mr Linley-Simon and Mrs Little provided us with what they thought was a good starting question but we quickly realised that it wasn’t a great starting point and came up with some better questions to help sort our animals.

Year 3 became hunter-gatherers yesterday as part of their learning about the experiences of Stone Age man. They scoured the school grounds for edible finds and then discussed which things they thought were safe to eat; how could you tell which foods were safe and they also thought about how difficult life could have been for Stone Age man. We also tried some of our school-grown apples!

We have been working so hard on our knowledge of place-value over the last few weeks in Year 3. Last week, we were set a tricky challenge – how many different ways can the number 340 be made using only hundred and tens counters?

This started off straight forward but then our teachers told us that for level 2 of the challenge, we were only allowed to use 2 hundred counters rather than 3. This then went down to only 1 hundred counter (and lots of tens!)

Our teachers were so impressed with our understanding of exchanging counters of equal value!

On Monday, Year 3 helped with some essential groundwork in our school grounds. They dug holes for some new trees and then helped to move our delivery of topsoil. It was hot and heavy work but they persevered and did a super job.

A wonderful first full week back in school, with a wonderfully balanced basket of learning! We had our first proper look at the true scale of the Stone Age through the medium of toilet paper…

From our Smiling Jack, the Stone Age begins (roughly; we’re working in a rather inexact format here).

At the other end, next to the pallets, is us in the present day. The first 3 sheets are written history, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

The other 217 sheets are when we were wearing furs, scratching a living from the Earth, largely by grunting and hitting things with rocks.

We also got stuck straight back into our mathematical thinking, working to truly master our understanding of the value of digits in numbers. Base ten equipment is really helping us with this, getting to grips with those tens in preparation for visualising 3-digit numbers…

This week in Science, we have been continuing our learning about nutrition by thinking about what makes a balanced diet. We decided that a balanced diet is when we eat a mixture of different foods to power our bodies.

We then enjoyed creating our own balanced meal!

Year 3 enjoyed exploring yesterday as they completed a scavenger hunt as part of their first Forest School session of the term. They made some interesting discoveries and even found a froggy friend!