Opal Class (Year 3)

 The new Opal Class have settled really well into Year 3. We have begun learning about our topic 'The Stone Age' through our English text, The First Drawing by Mordicai Gerstein. 

We wrote diary entries as a stone age child who created the first ever drawing on a cave wall, using a burnt stick as a pencil!

Then, in art, we looked at cave paintings and drawings and discussed the types of materials that would have been available to prehistoric people to make their art work with. A lot of cave drawings are based on lines and outlines, we created our own versions of these images with animals from British wildlife.

In maths, we have been looking at place value in numbers up to 1000. We have spent time looking at hundreds, tens and ones using practical base ten equipment and place value counters. 

We drew out the values of some 3 digit numbers in place value counters outside to make the most of the nice weather whilst we learnt!

 In our DT topic this half term, we will be learning to sew to make a decorative Christmas ornament. In our first lesson so far, we learnt to do a cross stitch - threading the needle was the trickiest part!

In Maths, we have covered so many topics but most recently we have been working on our rounding skills. We have taught ourselves a rhyme to help us remember which digits round up or down. We used rounding boards to practise this skill and even shared our knowledge on the board with each other.

Our recent Computing topic has been 'Coding' and we have really enjoyed using the ipads to have a go at creating our own animated sequences.

We had to learn how to sequence the coding blocks in order to make actions happen in the order we wanted them to and to give us the end result that we were working towards. We also learned to debug our code, when it wasn't working, we needed to spot the errors and correct them.

As we gained skills and confidence, we were able to write longer sequences of code with many different things happening, even using a timer to set things to happen in an order. 

In our Science topic 'Light,' we have been testing materials to see if they are opaque, translucent or transparent, We have also been working out show shadows are formed and how they can be changed.

 In Maths, our recent topic has been 'Length and Perimeter.' We have been learning different units of measurement and how best to use them. We really enjoyed measuring lots of different items around the classroom!

 In Science, we have been learning about Forces and we tested out how different surfaces can create different amounts of friction. To do this, we measured how far a car would travel along after we let it go down a ramp onto surfaces including foil, paper, felt, wood, bubble wrap and carpet.

 On World Book Day, we all dressed up as our favourite book characters and looked fantastic! We played book bingo - we had to find all of the squares by travelling round the different tables in our classroom with different genres of books.

We have also been writing factual non-chronological reports on the topic of Tea! This was inspired by our recent class text called 'Cloud Tea Monkeys' by Mal Peet and Elspeth Graham.

 Our DT topic this half term is "Constructing Castles" which ties in with our history topic "The Romans." We have started to look at features of castles, designed and labelled our own castles and begun to think about how we can construct one. 

In science, we are exploring 'Rocks and Soils' as our topic - and it has been much more interesting than it sounds! We have been testing properties of different types of rock, such as a rock's permeability, buoyancy and hardness.

In our experiment for buoyancy, we weighed the rocks dry, then dropped them each into water for 1 minute, then weighed them again. If they became heavier, we knew they had absorbed some water and were permeable. It was so exciting weighing them to find out!

In English, we have been reading The Thames and Tide Club by Katya Balen. We have absolutely loved it, and finding out about real mudlarking has been so interesting. We wrote adverts for new members to join our mudlarking club and put them up on our classroom wall to show them off.

 In celebration of the good weather arriving, we have been taking some of our lessons outside! Recently, instead of doing maths from a worksheet, we had to find the questions be searching around the playground!

In Science, our topic of investigation was 'Magnets.' 
We explored how magnets repel or attract due to their different poles. We created a maze on the table to investigate how the push force created by repelling magnet poles could drive a magnet through the maze without us ever touching it.

We have also been enjoying using iPads to extend our maths skills. We have been using a website called Purple Mash to play maths games that help us to consolidate our learning as well as taking quizzes to test our knowledge!