Book Week

We had a great day on Monday dressing up as our favourite book characters. We had Moley, Hermione, Harry Potter, Tom (from Beast Quest) x 2, a Roman soldier, the BFG, Beauty, Jasmine and loads more. See the picturebelow.
 Whilst dressed as book characters we had a parade in front of the school to show our costumes off, we had a go at hot seating where we took on the role of our characters and were asked questions which we had to answer in role. We wrote diaries for our characters and played a game using clues about them. That was just Monday!
The aim of the week was to promote reading for pleasure so we've had lots of opportunities to read. We shared our favourite book with a classmate, we read the stories we wrote recently to class 1. See below for some pictures.
Also this week we designed posters to promote reading for a competition. Otto's poster won with the message, 'Reading could save your life'. Other messages included; reading is awesome, reading is fun and reading helps you learn.

It has been a busy week but lots of fun with a real focus on books and reading.

Autumn Update

Apologies for the lack of blogs so far this term. We are going to try hard to update more frequently and involve the children in this process which will hopefully make it more interesting for you!
This week we began work preparing for our class assembly which is on the 13th November. Our aim is to show lots of the things we have been learning about this term.
Our theme in assembly this term is friendship and we had great fun on Tuesday making a web of friendship (see photo). We talked about how, as a class we are all friends even though we have our own special friends as well.

 Pictured above is our human bar graph to show our month of birth. We have been working hard on telling the time and we have now moved on to learning about the months of the year and seasons.

In guided reading this week the boys started work on poetry and they were keen to share a poem with the class afterwards which was fantastic!

In science this week we finished our work on light and shadow and we enjoyed using 'bbc science clips - light and shadow' a computer programme which allowed us an opportunity to explore shadows in the day and night and also those made by lots of materials.

Sadly the weather has prevented us from getting out to make human sundials but when an opportunity arises (probably in the Spring) we will revisit our work to enable us to see what happens for ourselves!

Monster Making!!

 We all had a brilliant couple of days making monsters as our D.T project this term. The challenge was to have a moving part using a pneumatic system which basically means using air!

                           Some of us had balloon tongues or noses powered by an empty bottle.

                                     We painted our monsters to give a nice finishing touch!

                               Some were bright and colourful and some were very black!

                          This monster had a brain that exploded from his head (using a syringe).

                      There were big monsters and small monsters but this has to be the biggest (not that it was a competition).
We ended our project with an exhibition for class 3 and the year ones to come and see what we had made. We all worked really hard and achieved monsters to be proud of.
OTHER NEWS
Tennis
We took a nice stroll down to Chalford Tennis Club on Wednesday for our tennis lesson. Thank you to parents for picking us up. It would have taken us quite a while to walk back, especially in the heat.  We have one more official tennis lesson from the club(at TK) but it is something we hope to do more of ourselves if TK will share their tennis courts!
The club has arranged a tornament with other schools to take place on 13th June and 4 children will go  to represent our class. It was very difficult deciding who should do this and we are still in communication with the club about it.
Literacy
We have been working really hard to write extended stories inspired by Roald Dahl's, 'Magic Finger' for a class book. We finished writing the stories this week!

Arts Week/End of Term

Can you see the likeness?

Guess who? Do you recognise either of these clay faces???

Apologies to anyone looking for the stories we mentioned in our assembly which we created in groups during arts week. I do not have the stories to add to our blog but we did make them into a book which we will have on display at our next open evening. If we can add them here also at some point then we will do!

We had great fun during Arts week as you will have heard all about if you were able to come to our assembly. If not, the pictures above show two of the activities we got up to. The girls are being illustrators in the first photograph. We worked with an illustrator to create our own cartoon characters which was really cool and we introduced them in assembly!

We also made clay faces with the help of Otto's grandfather who happens to be a sculptor.

Other activities included photo collage self portraits although noone was very keen to cut up their photograph to make these to begin with, but we made some very unusual and impressive pictures in the end!

 We also did beautiful landscapes, paper sculptures, photography, acting and lots, lots more. We didn't realise the arts could be such fun and it was brilliant to spend a week on them.

Week beginning 20/2/12

Our Trip to 'At Bristol'  20/2/12  

We had a brilliant day out on Monday and have written recounts about it. Here are some of them and some quotes from others.

 'I really liked playing with the rocket. I liked it when it went really high.' Molly N

 'My favourite part was the mirrors because they made me laugh.'  Sydney

 At ‘At Bristol’ we went to a workshop to learn about light and shadow. She showed us a trick where we had to pull a funny face behind opaque glass, somehow she made it see through, it was amazing.

After the workshop we went to investigate all the science, there were bodies and investigations. It was so fun! It was one of the best trips ever. There were hamster wheels that controlled the water buckets in the water tank. My favourite part was the bubble sheet, you dip a long metal pole in liquid and pull it out and get your very own bubble sheet.

There was a leaning room and mirrors that made us small. Downstairs there was a build your own rocket and make it fly activity and a hot air balloon. Elyse

 I went with Joshie on the coach. It took an hour to get there but it was worth it, it was amazing when we got there. First we went for a lesson about shadows and light. It took an hour too. Then we had lunch. Then we were allowed to use all of the science things such as a giant hamster wheel that powered a water wheel, seeing how a rocket comes down to earth and seeing what it feels like to film news. The giant hamster wheel was massive. Jim

On Monday we went to At Bristol. The first thing we saw was Alice showing us a bit of fogged up glass. But when she pressed a button, you could see through the glass. After that we went into a dark room where the lights were dangling above our heads. My favourite bit was launching the rockets. Otto

When we arrived at ‘At Bristol’ we put our stuff away and went to our workshop. It was about light and shadows. We found out lots of facts like which colour shows up the most, how glow sticks work, we learned some new words, these were transparent, translucent and opaque. We got to use rainbow glasses.

After lunch we got into our groups and went off to explore the museum. I liked the hamster wheel for humans. It was harder than it looked. I liked the three mirrors. One made us have a really long neck and our legs were tiny. One made us look really fat!! One made us look normal. I also liked the leaning room where everything was leaning and I felt really dizzy coming out. Last night when I went to bed I still felt dizzy!

I really enjoyed my trip to Bristol. I hope I can go again soon. Molly R

'I made giant bubbles, they were massive. My favourite part was the bubbles.'Elliott

 On Monday we went to At Bristol. When we got there we went to a workshop. There was some glass and Alice kept picking people to do faces behind the glass. But you couldn’t see it at first until she turned a light on and then you could see the funny faces.

After that we had lunch then we went into our groups although we didn’t really stay with our groups, we explored with our friends. We went upstairs first and there was a big screen on the floor which was the river and there was pretend fish swimming in the water and you could step on the screen and scare the fish away. My favourite part was when we went into the TV. Studio and I did the news. Then we went downstairs, there was lots of machines that you had to scan. I did one where you jumped and it showed you do it in slow motion and you went really high. Iona

'Upstairs I went on ‘Animate it’ and made a clip with Alec and Thomas. The clip was called ‘Angry Horse’, it was about a boy who tried (but failed) to get on a horse and the horse chucked the boy off. After that I put some music and sound to our clip.' Joshua R

Well done this week to Elyse for gettig her provisional pen licence and Iona for being worker of the week.



Week beginning 30/1/12

This week we have really been getting our teeth into our science topic about rocks. On Monday we looked at lots of different types and considered their properties and on Wednesday we investigated which rocks are permeable and why. We didn't get too wet!

In literacy we have enjoyed finding out about calligrams and descriptive poetry. We designed our own calligrams and our homework this week is to do more. We had some impressive ideas which are displayed on a poster in class, so look out for it! They were all great but Joshua R did a particularly clever lego design. Next week we will write our own poems.

In numeracy we have been working hard at telling the time, this is quite tricky and we have done lots of practical work with analogue and digital clocks.

In PSHCE we had a class discussion about what behaviour should result in going up or down the traffic lights. The addition of gold and silver is definitely very motivating and something we are all keen to achieve!

Year 3 projects were handed in on Wednesday. The children have been working hard on these for the last couple of months. Subjects include Lego, The Great Plague, Victorians, Australia and more. The children chose their own subject to research. They will now do a talk to the rest of the class to present their work and then projects will go on display in class.

Week ending 21/10

On Monday we enjoyed a mini volleyball session at Thomas Keble where we were taught by GCSE PE sports leaders. We all had a good time and hope to go back again in future.
We were joined by the Y4 for the afternoons this week. They helped us with a science investigation. We wanted to find out which was the warmest place in school using ice! On Monday we planned what we needed and how we were going to do it and on Wednesday we got busy! We were working in groups and each group chose where we tested so we ended up with the warmest places being the staffroom and Mrs David's office. We are going to repeat the investigation between these places another time.
It was great to have the older children to work with us as we had to plan what to do and how to do it ourselves.
On Tuesday we had a go at Zumba which was good fun and very energetic. That took most of our dance lesson so we only had time for a quick game of the action maker afterwards which of course we all enjoyed although we were quite tired by the end of it!
We made use of the year fours to do some French with us. We had conversations where we introduced ourselves and said how we were feeling. We are getting good at this now!
In literacy we were very busy this week. We wrote some brilliant non-fiction posters about dinosaurs, some of which are displayed in the classroom. The idea is that they will all be put into a book after we take the display down. We have really enjoyed finding out about dinosaurs.
Also this week we wrote our 'writing journey' stories which were inspired by dinosaurs. These stories  will be available to see at our book look on the 7th November.
Well done to Elliott for being this weeks worker of the week and to Molly R for being awarded our spelling trophy for October.