Welcome to Class 3 - Squirrels

Term 5 Overview

Spellings -26.04.2024

These are the spelling words that we are focussing on this week. We will have a test on Friday to see if we have remembered how to spell them!

chief, relief, shield, piece, believe

Tip - these words all make the '-ee' sound with '-ie'

Remember to practise your times tables on TTRS too!!

Our Easter Bonnet winners are...

Easter Bonnets!

Look at our wonderful creations!

Fantastic Friday

We did some painting with our friends for Fantastic Friday! It was great to see everyone's creativity all on one page!

School Trip - Egyptian Day

We went to Kent Life where they put on a wonderful day full of Egyptian themed workshops. We learnt about clothing, life around the Nile, how to make rope, we built our own pyramids, learnt about medicines, mummification and how we could entertain the Pharaoh with some dancing. We also had great fun playing in the playground!

Book Week

We have been looking at a selection of stories from ‘A Year Full of Stories’ by Angela McAllister and Christopher Corr. We have looked at the traditional Choctaw story of Grandmother Spider bringing fire to Earth which led to us writing our own stories for how fire may have come to Earth. We also liked the story of the Ship of Wheat and how the Lady of Stavoren had interpreted what is meant by ‘precious’. We then spent some time debating what the most precious thing was. After several rounds of voting, we landed on family being the most precious thing, although nature was a close second!

We had great fun dressing up on World Book Day - can you guess who we are?

Science - Plants

In Science, we have been identifying parts of a plant and thinking about their roles. We recapped the flower, leaves, stem and roots and have also learnt about some of the parts of a flower (stigma, style, ovary, filament and anther). These parts of a flower are needed for a plant to be able to make new plants. To help us with identifying these parts, we each dissected a daffodil.

Canopic Jars Part 2

We had so much fun painting our canopic jars so that they looked just like our designs from our Art Books!

Art Week

We had a wonderful time being creative during Art Week. We enjoyed working on our big project alongside Jo from Animate Arts and have never thought so carefully and philosophically about what might be behind a door! We begun by planning what the domestic scenes behind our doors might be and then chose a medium to create our big A3 final piece in. We then used blue pens to create a door that was special to us, since Delft is famous for it's blue and white pottery. These went on display, with the doors from all the other classes too, in the hall.

Canopic Jars 

We had lots of fun transforming old drinks bottles into canopic jars. We designed how we wanted our canopic jars to look and stuck with the Ancient Egyptian theme of them having animal heads. We begun making our jars by using newspaper and masking tape to model a head onto the top half of the bottle and then used mod-roc to cover both halves of the bottle, taking care to smooth out the little bubbles and overlapping bits of bandage. They're looking great and we can't wait to paint them!

Mummification

We learnt all about the gruesome process of mummification and then had a go at mummifying our friends (only the wrapping part, NOT the embalming!!). We did a great job and had so much fun!

Stone Age Tools

We went out into the forest area of the playground to find all the materials we would need to make our tool designs from last week. We then either worked independently or in pairs to make our designs using only the natural materials that we had found in the forest and some string to represent the natural cordage/ animal hair that many of us had used in our designs.

Stig's Den

We spent the afternoon in the woods making dens for Stig. We used good teamwork and had lots of fun working out how to actually make our dens stay up!

R.E. day – How do Christians and non-Christians celebrate Christmas?

We had a wonderful R.E. day learning about how different people celebrate Christmas. Joey’s mum told us all about how religion (and therefore Christmas) had been banned in Belarus for some time while she was growing up and so they celebrated New Year instead. Then we had an assembly with a Vicar who told us all about how she gets ready for Christmas in the church and some key things Christians do as part of their celebrations. Next, we wrote some letters to Father Christmas and made a comic version of the Christian nativity story. In the afternoon, we made Christmas cards and decorations for the Christmas tree in the hall. We also all contributed to a large piece of art which will be displayed in St James’ Church. Finally, we played a game where we wrote down our favourite Christmas traditions and then we had to guess who does that tradition. What a busy day!

Margate Caves

We had a wonderful day at Margate Caves! We had two sessions down in the caves looking at the paintings and learning about the chalk that was mined to form the caves. We also had a workshop where we were rock detectives looking at how different types of rocks performed in certain tests and a workshop where we had a go at making our own prehistoric paintings. 

Science - Different Types of Rocks

We learnt about how the different types of rocks were formed and then did a practical activity using sweets to represent this.

Igneous Rocks - lava or magma from volcanoes cools downs and hardens into rocks. We made honeycomb to represent the hot lava cooling down and hardening.

Sedimentary Rocks - layers of 'sediment' (dead plants, dead animals, small rocks, soils) become rocks over thousands of years due to pressure. We layered two different colours of Starbursts and then used the pressure of our hands to compress them into 'rock'.

Metamorphic Rocks - Igneous or Sedimentary Rocks that have been changed over time through exposure to extreme heat or pressure. We had a slice of Mars Bar which represented a Sedimentary Rock (layers!) and then changed it using the heat and pressure of our hands.

Cave Painting

We had  ago at our very own cave paintings today! We shuffled under our tables (which we had to imagine were caves!) and then had a go at doing water-colour painting on some tea-stained paper stuck to the underside of our desks. It was much trickier then we thought it would be but A LOT of fun!

STEM week

We've had lots of fun during our 'Movie Magic' STEM week! We started by looking at insulating ice to stop it from melting (inspired by Frozen!), we then looked at some clips from Moana and had a little competition to try to make a boat that would float with a little Lego passenger. We also watched a bit of 'Finding Nemo' and learnt about sea creature adaptations before having a go at designing our own sea creatures and thinking about how they could have adapted to living in their environment. We also watched some clips from 'Inside Out' and learnt about the brain being responsible for our emotions and then created a personal piece of art based on our reflections on one of the emotions that we identified. This week, we have also learnt about reversible and irreversible changes with the help of some popcorn and static electricity.

PTA Fun Run

We had a great time running with Class 6 during our Halloween Fun Run, although we were all a bit like zombies at the end!

Dessert

We made fruit salad or fruit skewers for our healthy dessert. We could also have Greek yoghurt, plant-based yoghurt or no yoghurt at all!

Main Course

We made a pasta dish for our main course! The children could choose from toppings including tomato and herb sauce, tuna, sweetcorn, ham, chicken and cheese. They then evaluated their meal, thinking about the things they liked and things that they would improve.

Bones

In Science, we learnt about lots of different bones in our body. We stuck the names of the bones onto Gretel and thought about what job the bones did and why we would have them. We also tried to locate them on our own body. The class were brilliant at using their Knowledge Organisers at the front of their Topic books to help them with this!

Starters

We made vegetables and dips for the first course of our menu. We could choose to have carrots, cucumber, baby corn, cherry tomatoes, red pepper, houmous, fresh salsa and sour cream and chive dip. We practised our cutting skills and some of us even peeled the skin off our carrots! We thought carefully about how we wanted to present our foods - there were a fair few vegetable faces!

Maps

In Topic, we have been learning about maps. We looked at a map of the school and added symbols and colours  (using a key) to show where different things could be found.

Irish Dancing

We had a wonderful time learning our '1, 2, 3s' in a short taster class with Danielle, who will be running an Irish Dancing club at school.

Newspaper Clothes

We had a little competition to see who could make the best outfit out of newspaper! All of the outfits were great but we loved the skirt on Joey's dress and so his team won!

Sports Day

We had lots of fun cheering our friends on and competing in Sports Day!

Sports Week

We've had lots of fun trying some new activities during Sports Week and also thinking about our own mental wellbeing. We tried yoga, golf, some teambuilding activities and made a smoothie using smoothie bikes. We also competed in an Interhouse Dodgeball match and tried playing benchball.

Clothes Project

We have had an ongoing project this term in Class 3! We had to design an item of clothing for a specific purpose with our group. We then turned this into a big poster and presented it to our friends. We had to answer any questions they had about our design and how we would make it. Then, we had a go at making our 'prototype'!

Art Week

We've had so much fun exploring 'Perfect Printing' in Art Week! We looked at collagraphs, which is a textured style of print made by creating an image using collage and then printing it. We designed our collagraphs, then had some practise prints so we could see if we needed to make any changes and then created our final piece. We also printed 2d shapes in Maths to create a picture, created a fact file on William Morris in English and gout outside to print using natural items we could find around us.

Coronation Celebrations

We had lots of fun at our Street Party on the playground to celebrate the King's coronation!

Performing Arts Week

We have had so much fun doing some work inspired by the 'Great Composers'.

We listened to 'Mountain' by Einaudi and created a piece of art that we thought was reflective of the piece of music.

We played around making music on Garage Band on the iPads.

We learnt about Florence Price, the first African-American female composer to have her music played by a major orchestra. We had a go at using our bodies to make percussion, similar to the patterns used in the third part of her 1st symphony. We then tried to recreate these rhythms on the Djembe drums. We also made some fact files about her which will be on display in the hall.

We listened to some film soundtracks composed by Hans Zimmer. We listened to 'Remember' from 'The Lion King' and thought about what the film might have been and what the story could be. We then made film posters for the films we'd thought of.

Computing - Class Wiki

This term we have been learning about wikis and how they can be used to work collaboratively on a project. We added a link to the school website on the Sheldwich Wikipedia page and the we created a wiki of our own at sheldwich.pbworks.com/. In the wiki, we added reviews of some of our favourite books and information about some of the things the class have been learning this term. We worked together on the the pages and learned about how we should be considerate and make our edits in good faith! 

Fantastic Friday - Glow Stick Party

We had so much fun dancing and playing with glow sticks for our Fantastic Friday activity. The girls took control of the iPad and took some cool photos.

Tom Delahunt

We had an amazing visit from Tom Delahunt who is a senior lecturer of Nursing and has written a children's book as part of his doctorate. He read his book to us, which was about being proud to be who you are. He also helped us to write some 'fridge poetry' which we loved!

Roots to Food

Today we had a visit from 'Roots to Food' where we learnt how to make Japanese Teriyaki Noodles. We learnt lots of new skills like stirring, whisking, chopping and peeling and enjoyed practising these when making our dish. We also learnt about the nutritional value of the food we were making and how different colours of vegetables have different vitamins/minerals. 

Skip2bFit!

We took part in a skipping workshop. We had to see how many skips we could do in 2 minutes and then (after a break) used our determination and perseverance to beat our own scores!