Friday 24th February

Home Learning

English: This week for your English I would like you research and find as many time conjunctions (sometimes called time connectives) as you can and then list them in your home learning book (if you know some already then write them down and get your list off to a good start). I will award 5 house points to the person with the longest list.

Maths: For Maths this week I would like some of you to look at the picture of the city skyline in your home learning book and try to spot as many vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines as you can, as well as spotting as many pairs of perpendicular and parallel lines as you can. Then next to the drawing of that type of line, I want you to tell me how many you found in Roman numerals. Use the Roman numeral grid at the bottom to help you. If you have not got this task in your home learning book then I instead want you to visit this http://www.topmarks.co.uk/Flash.aspx?f=bingomoreorless website and have go at the different more or less games. There are a few different challenges so make sure you move on if you are finding one a bit easy.

Spellings: You also have another 5 spellings this week.

What we have done this week

The first seven pictures of this week's blog show us completing an activity where we are learning about how to structure paragraphs. All of us in Class 3 now know that most paragraphs can be split up into topic, supporting and ending sentences and in the pictured activity we had a job putting paragraphs together again that had been split up in exactly this way.

The following two pictures show some of us completing an extension activity related to our America topic. In this activity the participants had to find as many of the United States of America as they could within a very large word search.

Also in this week's blog you can see a selection of pictures from when we had a tractor come and park in the school car park. It was a great treat for us in Class 3 when our turn came to see the tractor up close and talk to the farmers who had brought it on Wednesday afternoon.

The final two pictures link back again to our English topic of the week which has been on paragraphs. On Friday we got a chance to write some of our own on the topic of American animals and one or two of us were proud enough of what we had produced to want to read ours aloud to the rest of the class.  

Friday 10th February

Home Learning

You do not have any home learning to complete over half term. Having said this, any chance you get to read, do some times tables or spelling practice is great practice for when you get back. Have a great week, I look forward to hearing all about it.

What we have done this week

The first four pictures in this week's blog show Wednesday's and Thursday's Maths lessons. On Wednesday we had a ‘times tables snap tournament'. Each pair had a pack of cards which had various times tables printed upon them, various digits printed on them and various written numbers printed on them. Other than the cards it was a normal game of snap where if the subsequent card equalled the same answer as the one before it was a ‘snap’. The time playing against the same partner was marked by a timer and when the time was up pairs would switch around. We did the same thing on Thursday but this time it was a ‘fractions snap tournament’ where each pair's cards had various ways of representing different fractions (pictures, words and numerator and denominator) printed on them.

The last picture shows our Science lesson from Thursday afternoon. In this lesson we completed a forces and magnets quiz. First we had to grab a piece of scrap paper each and cut it into 18 pieces. Then we had to write our names on each and every piece. We had some boxes at the front labelled ‘A, B, C, D and E’. During the quiz we had to select our answer to each question by putting our names in one of the boxes at the front. After the correct answer had been revealed all of the names in that box were tipped into the lucky dip bag whilst all of the other boxes were tipped into the bin (of doom). Come the end of all eighteen questions Mr Balls picked a name out of the lucky dip bag and that person won ten house points! The more times we answered a question correctly, the more times our names went in the bag, the more chance we had of being selected and the more chance we had of winning the house points.

Friday 3rd February

Home Learning

English: This week for your English I would like you to fill in the gaps on the missing pronouns sheet I have stuck in your home learning book. The task is explained in more detail on the sheet and the missing pronouns are provided in order to support you, all you need to do is organise them correctly.

 

Maths: For Maths this week I would like you to use the website link in your home learning book to find out 3 new maths terms that you didn’t know before. For example, you might want to find out what a rhombus is or understand how to find the square root of a number. Write down your terms and what they mean in your home learning books, doing your best to impress me with your research skills.

Spellings: You also have another 5 spellings this week.

What we have done this week

The first 7 pictures of this week's blog show us looking at and adapting some poetry. All this week in our English lessons we have been concentrating on the importance of pronouns. Our first job in the pictured lesson was to go through a selected poem with a highlighter and highlight all of the pronouns that we could find in pairs. Once we had done this, our next job was to change those pronouns into proper nouns and then read our 'silly poems' aloud to the class. These 'silly poems' helped us to understand the importance of pronouns because the overuse of proper nouns can make our writing sound less interesting and silly.

The final two pictures of this week's blog show our first activity of this week's Science lesson. In last week's lesson we got into groups of 3 or 4 and thought of question we would like to investigate about magnets. All of the individual groups with their individual questions then planned their investigations, making sure that they listed the equipment they would need to carry them out and their predictions of their results. At the start of this week's lesson our equipment was ready for us so that we could start carrying out our investigations straight away. Our investigations ended in some interesting results and, as always in science, a lot more questions.  

Friday 27^th January

Home Learning

English: This week for your English I have stuck in the marked versions of your entry to the ‘BBC 500 Word Story Competition’. I have done this so that you can re-read what you have written and see where you could improve your story. There is still time to submit your story into the competition if you haven’t yet done so, via the website that was given out with last week’s home learning. To those who have already submitted (well done) I would like you to design a poster displaying all of the rules that you can remember for punctuating direct speech.

Maths: For Maths this week some of you have been given the task of converting pounds to pence and pence to pounds, carrying on from our work on money this week. I would like everyone else to have a go at solving the 3 word money problems that I have stuck in your books.

Spellings: You also have another 5 spellings this week.

What we have done this week

The first picture in this week's blog shows us playing with some 'roamers'. Playing with these allowed us to think more about our maths work we were doing last week, where we were concentrating on degrees of turn. We had three roamer bots and in groups we were challenged to program them to reach different targets. This involved us having to think about how many degrees we needed to make our roamer turn.

The rest of the pictures in this week's blog show our lesson on Friday when we wrote some book reviews about a chosen short story. The book review templates that we used are the ones that we will be bringing into our daily guided reading sessions and so Friday's English lesson was a chance for us to practice reviewing a simple book (for a start) in this way. For this practice, the book reviews were blown up to A3 size and we completed them in pairs. The end results were some lovely pieces of reading comprehension that we can now proudly display in Class 3. 

Friday 20^th January

Home Learning

English: For your English home learning this week I have stuck your entry to the ‘BBC 500 Word Story Competition’, that you wrote in class on Thursday, in your home learning book. Along with this I have stuck in some instructions telling you how you go about uploading your story onto the competition website (something you will need to do in order to enter). This is a job that you will need an adult’s help with.

Maths: For maths this week I would like you to complete the table that I have stuck in your home learning books which will test your knowledge of degrees in a turn, something we have been practicing in class this week.

 

Spellings: You also have another 5 spellings this week.

What we have done this week

The first two pictures in this week's blog show some of us reading our entries to the‘BBC 500 Word Story Competition’. On Thursday morning we went on the website and followed the online lesson 

complete with interactive activities. These activities led us nicely onto having a go at writing our short stories after break because they made us think carefully about setting, character and plot. Once each of us had written our stories we then enjoyed sharing them amongst each other throughout the rest of the day and week.

Picture 3 shows some of us doing some outside maths on Friday in pairs. We had to number ourselves 1 and 2. 1’s all stood in a line across the playground with 2’s standing behind them. 1’s closed their eyes and 2’s threw a beanbag out in front of them. 2’s then had to direct their partner to go and retrieve the bean bag without 1’s opening their eyes. The only instructions 2’s were able to give were walk forwards and turn so many degrees (90, 180, 360 or 270).

The final 2 pictures show our science lesson this week. We were learning all about forces that can act on objects without contact. We started off by talking about how gravity can pull items to the ground without anything touching them and then asked the question can any other forces do this. The pictures show us discovering that magnetism can also act in this way as we moved paperclips through card with magnets.

Friday 13^th January

Home Learning

English: This week I want you to identify the main and subordinate clause in each of the 4 sentences I have given you. The task is explained fully in your home learning books and there is also a definition of each of these clauses should you need reminding what they are.

Maths: This week some of you have been tasked with naming 5 3D shapes and their properties, while others have been given a sheet full of statements about shapes. Some of these statements are true and some of them are false and your job is to choose a colour to colour the ones you think are true and a colour to colour the ones you think are false.

Spellings: You also have another 5 spellings this week.

What we have done this week

Our new topic for this term is the the Americas. The pictures above show Class 3 working in pairs to find out the location of different US states on a map. Each pair had 3 A3 sheets each. One showed a map of the US with just the initials of the states labelled. Another showed a table with all of the initials labelled and the final sheet was another map, this time displaying the actual names of the states. Our job was to match up the initials to the state names on the maps and then correctly identify and list them on our tables. In Class 3 we have shown a great enthusiasm towards our topic so far and we are looking forward to building on our knowledge of the Americas as the weeks go on.