Year Three
14/03/2025
Over the past two weeks, Year 3 have learnt all about the infamous Henry VIII and his six wives. We have learnt the well-known rhyme, ‘Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.’ We have started to research how rich and poor Tudor life differed from one another, focusing on areas of life including, food, clothing, education, entertainment and housing. We will use this knowledge and our scientific knowledge of shadows to perform a shadow puppet show. We thoroughly enjoyed our trip to Hampton Court Palace on Friday 7th March. Lady Anne spoke to us about some of the jobs at court e.g. a gong scourer, spit boy, free-diver and the children had to decide which job they would opt for if they lived in the Tudor times. We were amazed by the sheer size of the Great Hall and enjoyed looking at all the portraits.
In English, we are writing a setting and character description for our own Wonderland setting. We have used Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (by Jeanne Willis) and clips from the Disney film to inspire us. We will be using expanded noun phrases, prepositional phrases, the five senses and the power of three within our text.
In Maths, we are using formal column method to solve subtraction questions. We are super at using column subtraction where there is no regrouping. We are now moving on to using regrouping when needed in column method.
We have made great progress in our group dance to Clean Bandit’s song, ‘Rather Be’. We are looking forward to learning more of our dance in our PE lessons.
Within our music lessons, we are creating compositions for an animation. Last lesson, we listened to a piece of music called ‘Night on a Bare Mountain’ and discussed what kind of story this composition might be telling. We considered thunder storms, a castle burning down, a battle and even suggested mountain climbing. We added movements and actions to the music to represent the story.
Thursday was outdoor learning day. We set up self-made sun dials to see how the shadows change throughout the day and how we can roughly tell the time using the sun’s position in the sky/the shadows on the ground. We also did a nature alphabet hunt and leaf rubbings using chalk and crayons.
6/03/2025- World Book Day
Computing
Year 3 have been introduced to using Scratch 3.0 on the computers for the first time and have already created some simple animations to help familiarise themselves with the new working environment whilst comparing the similarities and differences to Scratch Jnr.
They will be moving on to create an animation called Lost In Space which will help them learn the importance of sequencing and repetition in programming. Using Forever and Repeat loops, they will animate 5 different sprites including a spinning space monkey, a flashing rocket-ship that flies back to earth, an asteroid that bounces off the edges of the screen and a star that shrinks and grows.
28/02/2025
This half term, Year 3 are becoming artists in our wider curriculum. We will retell the historical story of the Tudors using our knowledge of light and shadows in a puppet show. We will also study the Tudor period in depth and create a piece of Tudor style portraiture. We are looking forward to our trip to Hampton Court Palace on Friday 7th March. This week, we have been conducting science experiments to explore what a shadow is and how they are made. We have also been testing what happens to a shadow when an opaque object is close to a light source and how it compares to when it is far away from a light source.
In our English lessons, we have been using Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (by Jeanne Willis) to write setting descriptions and using prepositional phrases to describe the White Rabbit and Alice’s journey into Wonderland. We are working towards creating our own fantastical setting in Wonderland.
In Maths, we have been working hard at using our times table knowledge to solve harder calculations. We have been doing this by scaling up and down by 10. For example: If we know that 4 x 3 = 12, we can work out what 40 x 3 is equal to. We are now moving on to using formal column method to solve subtraction questions.
In PE, we have started to learn our group dance to Clean Bandit’s song, ‘Rather Be’. We have learnt how to perform actions in cannon (one after the other) and how to incorporate high and low moves to make our dance more engaging and interesting.
We are looking forward to developing the whole dance and hopefully be able to share this with parents.
