Cyprus Class Year 3
Autumn Term 1 2023
What a start to the year! Cyprus children have settled in beautifully and it hasn't taken us long to get stuck into our learning.
In English we have been learning about the Traction Man story and started to write about some of the adventures he went on. We used our SPaG knowledge of expanded noun phrases to improve our sentences. We are currently writing some beautiful character descriptions about Fantastic Mr Fox which we will be sharing with the Year 5s in the last week of half term.
The children have worked incredibly hard in maths to recap our place value knowledge, and we have used concrete resources to help us understand numbers up to 1000. We have also been practising our 10 and 5x tables, attempting to answer up to 40 questions in 2 minutes!
All of Year 3 went on our school trip to Stone Henge in September. It was an amazing day out and the children in Cyprus class were brilliant representatives of our school. We visited the exhibition and had a talk about the history of the stones. We explored the model village of a typical stone age settlement and then we finally saw Stone Henge itself. The children took an awful lot from it and will be inspired by the trip for the rest of the term.
In art, we have been learning how to colour mix and how to shade using various sketching techniques. Our focus has been on leaves and the children are looking forward to creating clay leaves by the end of the half term.
Summer Term 1 2023
Cyprus class have been working extremely hard this half term. We have shown a great deal of aspiration in our writing and have finished our non-chronological reports on our created rainforest animals. They are hanging proudly on our wonder wall in the classroom. In maths, the children have been learning about fractions, shapes and lengths. Converting metres, centimetres and millimetres has been tricky but we’ve persevered. We also created 3D and 2D shapes using playdough and sticks, which proved tricky, but it helped solidify our knowledge of vertices, faces and edges.
We have started our latest topic in Geography and we’re loving finding out about the Amazon rainforest. The four layers of the rainforest are home to so many different animals and plants and the work we have completed has looked amazing in our books. Thank you for all the parents that completed a pick and mix with their children.
Linked with our topic on rainforests, we have also been learning about plants in Science. We can now name the various parts of a plant as well as explain why pollination is so important. We conducted an experiment in class that tested what cress seeds needed to grow and we were shocked that they could grow without soil!
In music this half term, Cyprus class have been learning a song called ‘Bringing us together’. It is a disco song that the children sing with energy and passion. We have also appraised a number of other disco songs such as ‘Carwash’ and ‘We are family’.
Finally, we have been very collaborative in art for the last few weeks. We have been creating collages, in teams, in the style of Henri Rouseau. This involved painting several sheets of paper and then cutting/ripping them to make a rainforest scene. The final pieces are huge and we are very proud of them.
Spring 2 2023
This half term has flown by! Cyprus class have enjoyed a variety of learning experiences this Spring and are more than ready for the Summer.
In English, we have been writing and performing our own playscripts. The children were split into groups and tasked with writing a script, from scratch, that used all of the usual features you would find in a playscript. They then rehearsed and performed their scripts in front of the other children. It was a fantastic speaking and listening activity that the children loved completing.
We have finished this term in Maths by looking at fractions. Understanding what different fractions look like and how to find fractions of different amounts. We have also been learning about equivalent fractions.
History this term has been gruesome. ‘The Romans’ was our topic and we couldn’t believe how much of Europe was conquered by the Roman Empire, even England! One of our favourite things to learn about was Queen Boudicca and her battle with the Romans. We carried on learning about Roman mosaics in Art and this lead us to designing and creating mosaics using glue and paper tiles.
We celebrated science week this half term, also. Our favourite experiment was the ‘Which biscuit is best for dunking’ lesson. We had to dip different biscuits into water, while keeping the test fair. The Custard Creams didn’t do so well but the Ginger Nuts were very good. We even got to eat some biscuits after the lesson. At the end of science week, we designed a T Shirt (pictures with Evie), using the science vocabulary we had been using.
We have been enjoying learning how to say colours in French. We now know how to say ten colours including Rouge, Jaune and Bleu.
SPRING 1 2023
Cyprus class have been hard at work since returning to our Milford School site and we have been enjoying our new classroom. The Spring term is always brilliant for progress and you can see this in the children’s work.
In English, we have written impending disaster stories and focused on using ominous adjectives and verbs to describe a disaster that is about to happen. This was linked with our topic about Pompeii. Following on from this, the children wrote newspapers to describe the disaster that included Mount Vesuvius.
In Maths, the children have been learning about arrays, multiplication and division and have participated in practical lessons to help deepen their understanding. Their speed of recall in their times tables is really improving!
This half term in science, we have been looking into magnetism and forces. We completed a big, whole class experiment about friction in which we rolled a toy car down a ramp and recorded the effects of landing materials. We found that the grass had the most friction.
Music and French lessons this half term have been focused on the instruments of the orchestra. We have learnt about the characters in Peter and the Wolf and can name more than ten instruments in French.
NOVEMBER 2022
We have been enjoying our learning in Cyprus class this half term and we are all settled in to being in Year 3. Our English and Maths work is improving in quantity and quality and you can really see that in our exercise books. In English, we wrote our own story in the style of Fantastic Mr Fox and loved changing the character’s names. We then wrote this up for our writing wall and we’re all incredibly proud of our work. In Maths, we have been learning how to add and subtract from different three digit numbers. We use concrete resources to really help us understand the numbers we are using.
In science we have been learning all about light. We researched how the sun can be good for us, but also how it can be bad for eyes/skin so we need to protect it. We also completed a great experiment that tested how the direction of the light source could change the size and length of the shadow.
Music has been great this half term. We learnt how to sing and perform the song ‘Three Little Birds’ by Bob Marley. We used glockenspiels to play the music and sang the lyrics on top of it. We’re looking forward to continuing our glockenspiel lessons into the Autumn term.
It has been fascinating learning about the world around us in Geography. We have been taught all about the different times zones on Earth and also the different countries and cities that make up the United Kingdom. To think that we are at school while other children, on the other side of the world, are still asleep is crazy!
Everyone in Cyprus class is really looking forward to the second half of our Autumn term and the lead up to Christmas.
OCTOBER 2022
English – In English we have been learning the story of Fantastic Mr Fox. We have created our own story based on the events in the book and have really enjoyed writing about our own character, Resilient Mr. Rabbit.
Maths – In Maths we have been learning all about place value. We are starting to add and subtract within 1000 and we have learnt how to present our work in our books. We love completing our times tables booklets in class and have almost mastered our 10s and 5s now.
Science – In Science we have been learning about light. We have learnt about which items are sources of light, which objects are reflective and how light enters our eyes. We designed a new hat to keep the sun’s rays out of our eyes.
