We can use the computer to put our favourite topic photos together!
We have learned a long list of skills to be able to do this:
Our topic, ‘Indiana Jones and the Pharaoh’s Curse’, has finally come to an end and it has been fantastic. We have had great fun and learned a lot. Mr. Crouch and I are very, very proud of all the children. They have worked incredibly hard and made this topic a pleasure to teach.
Take a look at this letter to find out about our end of topic challenge day and then scroll down the blog to see how we did…
[embeddoc url=”https://birdwellyear3.edublogs.org/files/2020/11/End-of-topic-challenge.pdf” download=”all” viewer=”google” ]
For thousands of years, it has remained locked tight and hidden away from the world. Will our children be able to complete every challenge in order to break the curse and allow the chest to be opened?
The treasure chest took some opening! Once we had managed to complete all of the challenges Mr Mathieson (just) managed to lift the chest onto a table between the 2 classes…we then had to say the magic words and the chest opened!
Out poured (biscuit) Gold Bars, (jelly) worms and spiders and dozens of (chocolate) gold coins!!! A treasure fit for a Pharaoh! Well done Year 3, you managed to finally lift the Pharaoh’s curse…I wonder what our next topic will be?
First, the children must navigate a daring assault course, using the PE skills Mr. Crouch has taught them all term, to balance, travel at height and control their movement. Then, just like Indy, the children must take a daring leap of faith. Each child will choose the dismount from the apparatus that is a challenge for them! Do they have the courage they need to make it to the Pharaoh’s tomb??
This is where our intrepid archeologist hone the physical fitness and lightning reactions! Training to dodge poison arrows, jump pits of death, push endurance to the limit and remember to grab their hat when it falls off!
Can our teams use their knowledge of the Nile valley and their understanding of the water cycle to become museum curators and explain how it all works to you at home?
A cryptic video message…ancient and mysterious relics…a tricky puzzle to solve…it looks like we are going to need all of our knowledge about Ancient Egypt to succeed!
Tomb raiders have disturbed the bones of the Pharaoh, making him very angry and cursing all archeologists! We have to use our scientific knowledge of anatomy to rearrange the bones correctly…
The Pharaoh’s ancient stone tablets are littered around the school field.
The children will use all of their finely honed archeology skills to locate the tablets and decipher the hieroglyphs to crack the code. Once they decode every word and reassemble them in the right order, they will be able to solve the ancient riddle left by the Pharaoh centuries ago…
Well done everyone…I think most groups got most of the words (no thanks to the wind and rain doing their best to make all of the clues disappear!!!) The answer is…
Boom boom!
We are going to risk life, limb and laundry on our quest to find the Pharaoh’s relic…behold the tunnel of terror!!!! Somewhere in all of the gunk, leaves and creepy crawlies lies the relic that will help us unlock the chest!
Can I just say a huge thank you to all of our parents! Today was so much fun! The rain didn’t stop us and every single pupil went through the Tunnel of Doom. We had LOTS of squealing and screaming but all of them had a ball! Even the ones who were really scared before they went in wanted another go!
Thank you so much for sending their old clothes and allowing us to get them in such a state! We have been really frustrated that we haven’t been able to take them on a trip to the museum so it gave us the chance to end a truly fantastic topic in a way they will remember! Thanks again.
We are very nervous and excited!!!
We recreated the elegant masks used to cover the faces of the pharaohs when they died. Mr Baikley wouldn’t pay for us to use real gold but we did a good job of making them look convincing…
Well, I hope so as my classroom certainly wasn’t after whole-class bread making! We had lots of fun and the bread looked surprisingly delicious:
We used traditional ingredients such as pistachio nuts and honey but we left out the sand! (Ask your children why they used to use sand in their bread making and what problem it caused!) As always in my class, the children did all of the recipe reading, measuring ingredients and baking themselves…if they got the recipe wrong it got made wrong! But luckily, we all seemed to enjoy our creations…
The soundtracks to the films we watch can drastically influence our mood. They can make us feel excited, scared, happy, sad and even inspired! How would you describe the way that the following movie clips make you feel?
Can you explain HOW they make you feel like this? What is the music doing? Is it loud or quiet? Does it change speed or pitch? Do the notes sound good together or do they jar against one another? How does the music change as the piece goes on?
[embeddoc url=”https://birdwellyear3.edublogs.org/files/2020/11/Movie-Sound-Tracks.docx” download=”all” viewer=”google” ]
All of these changes from piece to piece have names. Today, we will find out about volume, tempo & pitch. We will be experimenting in class with these elements to see how we can change the tone of a piece of music.
Mr. Crouch was fed up of seeing all of the children having nothing to play with, in our socially distanced play areas. So, he persuaded Mr. Bailey to dust off his wallet and TREAT THE WHOLE SCHOOL to new sets of play equipment for each class! Well done Mr. Bailey and THANK YOU MR. CROUCH!
This morning, we were joined in Year 3 by 2 strange looking chaps:
They were 2 dummies that Mr. Swallow had brought it so we could see the way that the Ancient Egyptians removed the organs from a body when they mummified it. We concentrated on:
Ask your child if they can tell you what each organ does and where it is in their body!
We are also focussing upon our skeletal system We have learned the names of the most important bones and what their job is. Ask us all about it!
To be like Indiana Jones, we have to be disciplined and work together. Mr Crouch did some drill training with us to see if we could all work together!
Today, we examined the results of the science experiment that we began before the half-term holiday. we checked to she which method of preservation had worked the best:
Mr Swallow had saved an apple with no types of preservation applied at all, we called this the control apple. We compared our apples to the control apple to see if they had been preserved any better than Mr Swallow’s.
We then compared our apples to one anothers and ranked the apples from best to worst. We then put up our hands to indicate which method we used, this allowed us to see which methods were generally the most or least effective
We have dusted off our Scientific Investigation skills in order to find out more about how and why the Ancient Egyptians preserved bodies by mummifying them.
To help us understand, we have looked at different methods for preserving food. Each team chose the method that they thought would be most effective and designed an investigation to compare that method to another. As always in my class, the children did everything themselves!
Each team ended up with 2 methods of preservation that they can compare. We also have my apple which I have sliced up the same way but not used any method of preservation at all. We call this the CONTROL APPLE.
Ask your child about which method they chose and what other methods of preservation that they can remember…can they tell you what that method is and how it works?
How did the Ancient Egyptians make a mummy? Click the links to see a variety of informational texts and videos about the process.
Our water-colour sunsets are up on the wall (well, the finished ones are)
Even the class mummy looked impressed!
Religion played a big part in the lives of the Ancient Egyptians. They believed in a wide variety of gods and goddesses. These gods could take different forms, usually as animals. The same animal may represent a different god depending on the area, temple, or timeframe.
Major Gods and Goddesses
There were some gods and goddesses that were more important and prominent than others. Here are some of the more important ones:
Ra – Ra was the sun god and the most important god to the Ancient Egyptians. Ra was drawn as a man with a hawk head and a headdress with a sun disk. At one point Ra was combined with another god Amun and the two made an even more powerful god, Amun-Ra. Ra was said to have created all forms of life and was the supreme ruler of the gods.
Isis – Isis was the mother goddess. It was thought that she would protect and help people in need. She was drawn as a woman with a headdress in the shape of a throne.
Osiris – Osiris was ruler of the underworld and god of the dead. He was the husband of Isis and father of Horus. Osiris was drawn as a mummified man with a feathered headdress.
Horus – Horus was the god of the sky. Horus was the son of Isis and Osiris. He was drawn as a man with the head of a hawk. The ruler of the Egyptians, Pharaoh, was thought to be the living version Horus. In this way Pharaoh was the leader of the Egyptian religion and the people’s representative to the gods.
Thoth – Thoth was the god of knowledge. He blessed the Egyptians with writing, medicine, and mathematics. He was also god of the moon. Thoth is drawn as a man with an Ibis bird head. Sometimes he was represented as a baboon.
Temples
Many Pharaohs built large temples in honor of their gods. These temples would have large statues, gardens, memorials, and a place of worship. Towns would have their own temples as well for their own local gods.
Some famous temples include the Luxor Temple, the Temple of Isis at Philae, the Temple of Horus and Edfu, the Temples of Rameses and Nefertiti at Abu Simbel, and the Temple of Amun at Karnak.
Was Pharaoh considered a god?
The Ancient Egyptians considered Pharaoh to be their main intermediary to the gods; perhaps more of a high priest than a god. He was, however, closely associated with the god Horus and may have, at times, been considered a god in human form.
Click these links to find out more about the Gods and even take a quiz…
We found out that the Ancient Egyptians worshipped certain animals. They treated some of them better than people! The animals were seen as special because they either belonged to a certain God or even that the God lived through them!
We found out that they even mummified some creatures so that they could be buried with their owners, to keep them company in the afterlife!
We took lots of pride in the work in our topic books, take a look at these faces of concentration…
Mr. Crouch is training us to be fearless explorers! That means we have to know how to travel safely across apparatus, maintain good core and balance plus, know how to dismount to the floor safely.
Each week, Mr. Crouch focusses on a different aspect of balance, control, travelling, climbing or dismounting and at the end of the session, we use our skills in an Indiana Jones-style adventure across the hall!
I’m sure you all guessed correctly that our class model was intact a replica of the journey that the river Nile takes through Egypt…obviously!!!
We are using the model to map out where geographical features of Egypt belong, such as the Red Sea, the deserts, the mountains, human settlements and the archeological sites like the pyramids. (They will be added as we cover them)
However, our model has also allowed us to examine and show how the water cycle works in Egypt…
1. Evaporation. The water is turned to vapour in the heat of the sun and rises up into the air
2. Condensation. The vapour cools & collects into clouds. As soon as the cooling vapour touches something solid (such as sand or dust particles in the air) In turns back into water
3. Precipitation. When the water gets too heavy for the clouds to hold, it falls back to Earth as rain. This tends to happen in cooler places such as mountains as the colder air makes more vapour condense.
4. The rain runs into valleys, streams and rivers where it returns to the sea so the whole cycle can start again.
Ask your child to tell you about the different parts of the cycle, use the photos and terminology to help. Try to encourage them to use the correct vocabulary:
Here is a couple of links to help you discuss it (See if you can make your mind out which narrator has the most annoying voice, I’m struggling to decide!)
Hi Year 3,
Below is a reading extract on Ancient Egypt with some questions to answer.
Reading questions
We really did look like Indiana Jones today!
We heard from a trusty source (Mr Swallow) that there could be priceless Egyptian necklaces buried on the school field. So, we took our trowels, sieves and paintbrushes down there to investigate and ended up with the find of the century!
We had to be careful to sieve all of the sand we moved as Mr Swallow had warned us that there could be precious gems hidden in the sand.
Like all good archeologists, we tried on everything we found!
As we get the rest finished, they will go on the wall too. Ask us our explorer names that we made up, they are very funny! I particularly like, Panther Lawrance, Sarah Sahara and Rocky Mountain Riley!
We have been very busy this morning making our own (extremely authentic-looking) Egyptian neck-piece. The children GOT THEIR OWN EQUIPMENT from our shelves, then COVERED THE TABLE THEMSELVES and finally, GOT THEIR OWN PAINTS AND CRAFT MATERIALS!
That’s how grown up we are in Year 3!
However, that is not the most impressive aspect of our lesson! We also tidied up ourselves! I didn’t help AT ALL! The kids put all of the resources away and tidied up the rubbish themselves. Take a look at our classroom after a full lesson of painting, sticking and glitter…
So, when they make one of these for their homework, they’ll be able to do the same at home!
Well done kids, I’m very proud of you all!
…Don’t worry, we won’t blame you if you can’t tell just yet!
Year 3 are busy crafting something strange out of wood, card, tape and plaster! Can any of our grown ups guess what it is and leave their guess as a comment on here? (No cheating and asking your kids!)
Mr Swallow gave us a REALLY tricky text to read about fossils. It had lots of difficult words that we had never heard of before! We had to find the words in a dictionary and write down what they mean, this is called a definition.
It has been a LLOOOOONNNNNGG time since we last did dictionary work so it took us a lot of reminding how to use the alphabet to find the words we needed.
We have been learning about the Ancient Egyptian writing system. known as hieroglyphics. We wrote our names in hieroglyphs and then carved it onto a stone tablet (well, actually it was a bit of wallpaper that we made look like a tablet but don’t tell anyone!)
We were so good at it that we decided to write a secret message in hieroglyphs!
Then, we became real-life archeologists and chose another person’s book so we could try and crack their coded message!
We came across all of the problems that archeologists face in real life…spelling mistakes, symbols that could be interpretted as more than one letter and words that didn’t seem to make sense! however, we persevered and did really well decoding the messages. It was lots of fun!
We know that the Ancient Egyptians lived a long time ago…but we were surprised to discover just HOW LONG AGO! We also discovered that they were around for A VERY LONG TIME!
We even discovered that the end of the Egyptian empire and the rule of Queen Cleopatra was actually closer to TODAY than it was to the building of the pyramids!!! WOW!
Take a look at our timelines to see what happened, when.
We have been using Google Earth, maps and atlases in class as well as some old-fashioned maps of Egypt to look at what the country is like and where it is in the world. We have:
when we get home, ask us to find Egypt on a map. Also, ask us why all of the towns and cities in Ancient Egypt happened to be right next to the river Nile!
As you can all imagine, we have had to make a few changes around school to suit the current restrictions but hopefully our room still looks inviting…
