Spring 1 Update

Well we had a great first half to the Spring term and produced some great art and written work based around our class text – How To Train Your Dragon! The standard of writing is really  improving and looks great displayed in our classroom!



 

We have also been looking at ‘Animals Including Humans’ in Science and looking at different types of animal skeletons and their purpose and comparing them to our own.

 

Merry Christmas!

What a great half term we’ve had! We’ve learned all about France and finished reading our class book – ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ which the children have loved! We have done some fantastic character descriptions and Tim Burton style art work based around the book and to finish it all off, we watched the film!

Take a look at our amazing work on display!

Keep practising those 3 & 4 times tables on TT Rockstars and have a fantastic Christmas! See you all in the New Year!

Mrs Ekins

 

Roman comic books

We designed our own comic book panels to depict a gladiatorial fight in the colluseum.  After looking at examples of comic books, we realised that the panels rarely just showed the protagonists as viewed from the side.  The best panels did clever things like zoom in on the action and only show the most important elements in each scene.

 

We copied this idea by taking photographs of our friends at each stage of the ‘fight’ or finding photos online that matched what we wanted.  Just like the comic books Mr Swallow showed us, we focussed upon what mattered in the scene and used framing or zooming to make the action seem real.



 

The final stage was to trace the photos we had arranged into a comic book style, adapting the clothing and props to give it the Ancient Roman look…see what you think.

Marvel Studios had better watch out!

Persuasive adverts

Our challenge was to sell our, ‘unique’ car through the use of our persuasive powers.  Yesterday, we looked at how choosing the right vocabulary when describing an object can be very helpful in persuading people they would like it too!  Check out these amazing car adverts sent in…

Faith                                                                                and Frankie

Very good girls, I agree that ‘the engine may need some attention’ Faith and the maybe ‘a lick of paint and some TLC’ would help too, Frankie!  Brilliant!

 

Dr. Seuss STYLEEEEE!

We have been discussing the style of poetry that Dr. Seuss uses a lot in class.  We have decided that we can see 3 tricks that he regularly uses…

  1. He repeats words and phrases often, even on the same page
  2. He makes up new creatures to rhyme with difficult words.  He uses rhyming words, even in the middle of a line!
  3. Can you spot and highlight any examples of this below?

Writing Task: The best Christmas present ever!

We are going to do a short piece of writing in which we retell the eperience of opening our favourite ever Christmas present.

To help us prepare for this piece of writing, we shall develop several skills over the next few days:

  • Describing Feelings, if we just say we are excited or happy then it doesn’t have much effect on the reader. However, if we can capture HOW we feel and what we do when we are excited or happy then we can make our readers feel the same.  Lesson 1 will build our skills in this.  
  • Superlatives, these are words that are the extremes of everything…biggest, fastest, coolest, greatest, best.  we are going to look at how to use the -est suffix and also when NOT to use it.
  • Building tension, holding things back from the reader and making them wait makes them want to read more.  We will look at some stalling tactics to use in our writing.

 

  • Cliff-hanger endings, sometimes telling the reader exactly what happens at the end can be a disappointment if it’s different from what they picture in their mind whilst reading. Let’s explore the cliff-hanger ending.

Once we have mastered all of these skills, we will use them all to tell you about the greatest Christmas gift we ever unwrapped.

Using a dictionary

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.

Forest senses

We have visited the forest (woods) at the bottom of our school field to build up a bank of forest vocabulary to use in our writing. We have focused on the senses to bring our writing to life, we thought about what we could see, hear, smell and touch.

Check us out taking in all of the senses and bringing our writing to life!

Spelling homophones

Spelling more homophones

Homophones are words that are spelled differently and have different meanings, but are pronounced in the same, or almost the same, way. They are often confused in children’s writing.  We have covered this before but I want to revisit it as I’ve added in a few new pairs of words…

accept/except, affect/effect, ball/bawl, berry/bury, brake/break, fair/fare, grate/great, groan/grown, here/hear, heel/heal/he’ll, knot/not, mail/male, main/mane, meat/meet, medal/meddle, missed/mist, peace/piece, plain/plane, rain/rein/reign, scene/seen, weather/whether, whose/who’s

Invasions – Creative Writing

https://www.literacyshed.com/the-sci—fi-shed.html

Click on the above link and scroll down until you get to the video called ‘Invasions’ from Clement-morin.com

This is a short film about an alien who visits earth.

As you are watching, think about what he sees as he travels to different places on Earth and write a log for each of the main events.  This might take you a couple days to produce.

For an extra challenge, think how he might describe unfamiliar objects as he might not know the names of these objects.

Look at the examples below for ideas:

Descriptive writing

Descriptive Writing – Pandora

https://www.literacyshed.com/the-sci—fi-shed.html

Click on the above link and scroll down until you get to the video called ‘Pandora‘.

This is a short ‘documentary’ about Pandora, the planet from the film Avatar.

Imagine that you are an astronaut who has landed on this planet.  Write a detailed description of the planet and its inhabitants.  

Be as creative and descriptive as possible, using ambitious vocabulary and using varied sentence structures and punctuation.

Spellings

Hi Year 3,

I have attached 2 weeks’ worth of spellings.

It is important that you know what the words mean too. Maybe you could practise them in your working-from-home book by using similar activities to the ones we do in our orange spelling books in class. You could even even get someone to test you on them next week or play some spelling hangman.

Mr Mathieson

Y3 Retelling of a Roman myth

Class 3 were very successful in their retelling of the Roman myth, Romulus and Remus. They used a storyboard and actions to help them to remember the details. Well done!