Year 3 Summer 2023-24
A Visit from Newcastle University
Year 3 had a visit from the Science team at Newcastle University this week. They discussed what a scientist is, what jobs you can do within Science, and showed us a range of experiments which demonstrated some of the work carried out by the people who do these jobs. We really enjoyed it, and learnt a lot!
Literacy - Explanation Texts
Year 3 are learning about explanation texts in Literacy this half term. At the end of the unit, we will be writing our own explanation text so to help us with this, we explored the structure of explanation texts by ordering the steps.
RE: Celebrating the festival of Purim
Today, we have been learning about another Jewish festival – Purim. This is a festival which celebrates a time when Jews in Persia escaped a plot to harm them. In 400 BC, Haman, the Persian King’s advisor, plotted to kill all the Persian Jews. To choose a day for the killings, he drew lots (which means that he picked a day by chance). But the Persian queen, a Jewish woman named Esther, convinced the king to stop Haman. This story is told in the Book of Esther in the Bible. On Purim, Jews go to a synagogue and listen to a reading of the Book of Esther. Afterwards, family and friends have a festive meal. People exchange gifts of food and give to the poor. They also eat pastries called hamantaschen, which means “Haman’s pockets.” The pastries are supposed to resemble Haman’s three-cornered hat. The celebration often includes acting out the story and playing games. To support with our learning and understanding of the story, we acted it out and created freeze frames of key scenes. You can see some examples of these below.
DT - Focus Group and Peer Feedback
In DT, Year 3 have been designing their own piece of wearable technology. We followed design criteria as follows: for children; to make someone visible in the dark; must be colourful; and must use computer aided design. Once we had completed all of the elements of the specification, we shared our designs with our friends who gave use positive and constructive feedback in relation to the design criteria. We then discussed and fed back in the form of a focus group.
Science: Friction Investigation
This term in Science, we are learning about forces. In today's lesson, we have been investigating the effect friction has on a car's tyres. To carry out this investigation, we pushed a toy car across 4 different surfaces to see which one created the most friction and which created the least. We found out the grass had the most friction and decided this was because of its texture and unevenness. We also found out that the hall floor had the least friction because it is made of wood, and is a smooth, shiny surface.
RE - What did Jesus look like?
In RE, we have been looking at different representations of Jesus and discussing why representations may vary. We were given a range of images of Jesus and asked to copy the one we believe to be the best representation. We then had to explain why we thought this, and what we personally believe he looked like.
