Welcome back, Primary 3!

We had a very busy start this week.

Before the October holidays we had a vote about our new class novel and most of us agreed that it would be lovely to find out what happens to Tomas and Flicker next. So, we decided to read,”The boy who dreamed of dragons” by Andy Shepherd. some of us felt that we already knew the characters and we would be familiar with them.

We spotted straight away that Flicker the dragon looks more grown up when we discussed the front cover. We knew that Tomas could not fly on Flicker’s back at the end of the first novel.

In Spelling we explored short vowel sounds and learned to recognise these words, spell them, rhyme them with other words and we also wrote sentences.

Mrs Hope gave us some Base Ten materials and we had a great time exploring Place Value and how numbers are made. Using the Base Ten really helps us to see how the numbers are made up and it was lovely to be able to chat to our learning partners about big numbers.

Our highlight this week was learning about Coding. We had such fun using the little picture cards and getting our friends to move around the classroom. We even had to pretend we were sleeping for one of the commands! Then we created our own codes for a partner to follow. We had to have a clear start and a clear finish so we started with a green flag and finished with a red flag.

We are looking forward to turning these into programs for the Beebots. We enjoyed Coding so much that we will research other activities that we might like to explore. Coding really challenged our thinking this week but, we felt so proud of ourselves when we had created our own programs.

We also started to look at RECOUNT in our Writing. This is quite different to the descriptive writing we did in Block 1 but, we are looking forward to learning how to write a recount and then write our own.

In groups we also thought about what we already know about night and day as this is our new Science topic. At first we thought we only knew a few things but, when we started recording it on our sheet we were amazed that we had written and drawn so much.

We are looking forward to finding out more about night and day.

This week we have planned and written our own dragon description for our writing assessment following the correct structure (title, introduction, characteristics and evaluation).

We have continued to work on the sequence of numbers to 1000 identifying larger/smaller numbers and putting numbers in the correct order from largest to smallest or smallest to largest.

Our novel is The Boy Who Grew Dragons and we created dragon eyes made with clay.  Here are some examples

We investigated the sense of taste and excited our taste buds with salty, bitter, sour and sweet foods.

Ayla, Emily and Max did not like the bitter taste of the unsweetened chocolate.   Ayla and Emily enjoyed the sweet taste of the fruit pastel.  Ayla also liked the sour taste of the lemon and Emily liked the salty taste of a crisp.

We also carried out the experiment ‘ Can you taste without your nose?  We were blind folded and had to hold our  noses.  We were then given two different foods – apple and potato and had to identify which was the apple and which was the potato.   We all managed to do this.

However, taste is more  complex than a simple message from the taste buds on the tongue.  Foods stimulate the nerves in the nose as well as the mouth and can be difficult to identify the food type when there is no information from the nose.

Primary 3 wish everyone a happy and relaxing mid-term break.

See you all on Tuesday 19th October 2021.

This week we looked at the sense of touch and went on a Texture Scavenger Hunt around the school.  We had to find items that were bumpy, hard, smooth, rough, spiky etc.

We also tried to guess what things were in the box with a sock over our hand.  The banana got squished.  Anna felt a mug.   Gray felt a spoon. Max said it was tricky to identify the paintbrush.

We carried out a Paperclip Experiment.  We moulded the paperclip into a U and pressed the two parts on a partner’s skin.  We then had to ask our friend how many points he or she felt.   We did this on different parts of the body.  This should us that different parts of the body have more or fewer touch receptors and sometimes you can’t feel everything that is in contact with your skin.

We studied the different layers of the skin as well.  The skin has three layers;  epidermis, dermis and hypodermis (subcutaneous fat).  Our touch receptors are in the dermis layer.

We have been discussing friends and friendships and we made a friendship tree with ideas on how to be a good friend written on leaves and flowers.

We said a fond goodbye to Mrs Shearlaw who has worked at Kingsland Primary School for 31 years.

We have had another busy week with lots of successes.

It has been a long time since we have done Problem Solving so first of all we used cubes to help us to see the answer and then we learned about the strategy – draw a picture. This was fun and it was hard to believe we were doing Maths. When we thought about it we realised that using the cubes was also helping us with our numbers.

We designed a dragon eye on paper then we tried to make it with play doh as a little practice for when we use clay next week. We are all really excited about that!

Mrs Ryalls brought in her dragon kite and we had to guess what was in the box. We thought it was a mungle flap! ( hen ) . The head of the kite is amazing and we have really enjoyed studying it.

Mrs Ward lent us her dragon toys and we got to cuddle them in our class for a few days. They were very welcome visitors.

We have been working together and team building but, we still find it a challenge to share and compromise. So, we are going to keep working together on challenges to help us to work with others.

We designed a dragon then made a plan. When we were happy with the plan we wrote a description that included a title, an introduction, a description of the dragon and a personal comment or evaluation. Although this was hard work we were very proud of our descriptions when we completed them.

We are continuing to work on learning the 3 school rules.

I behave safely

I listen to and follow instructions

I respect people and property

Well done, Primary 3 !

Elections

This week we held our class elections for the Class Representative for the School Council and for the Sustainability Squad.

Many children stood in front of the class giving their reasons why they wanted the job and what skills they had.  Well done everyone.

The class voted for Rory to be the representative for P3 on the School Council (Ayla is the class secretary) and Emily to be the representative on the Sustainability Squad.

Science

As part of our science work on The Senses we carried out a smelling experiment this week.

Drew liked the smell of the sanitiser.

Imogen liked the smell of the banana,

Elsie liked the smell of chocolate.

Emily liked the smell of coffee.

Ayla liked the smell of cinnamon.

Gray liked the smell of garlic.

Kelsey did not like the smell of toothpaste.

Ciarian did not like the smell of garlic,

Isaac did not like the smell of perfume.

River did not like the smell of onion but Rory loved it.

Numeracy – Measure

We have been estimating and measuring in metres and started to make a fish about one metre long.

Literacy – Writing

We described Flicker the little dragon in our novel for our writing and followed the correct text structure.

Health and Wellbeing

We discussed what makes a good friend and created a Friendship Tree with all our ideas.

We also said goodbye to Ms Hobbs who has been great help in the class.  We made this lovely card for her.

This week we have been focusing on our sense of smell. Mrs. Scott delivered a bag to our door and we were so excited because we thought it was a delivery of food! We had to use our nose to smell the lid of the container and try to guess what was inside.

We were very good and got some of them right first time. For example cinnamon and perfume. Others were not so easy – like garlic and hand sanitiser.

We looked at words with short O for our spelling. For example pot, hot, shop and compose. We used some of the words in a short sentence and we did very well with our dictation,

This week we had to vote whether to make a class dragon or a dragon house with our shoe boxes. The votes were very close but, the dragon house won. So, we have made a start on the dragon houses this week and we had great fun with the paints.

In Writing we thought hard about what Flicker the dragon looks like in our novel. Then we drew it, labelled it and followed our structure for writing a description, The fun bit was writing the evaluation and we are very good at that.

We have been learning about how to be more resilient when things get choppy on the river of life. We made boats and chose some things to take with us that help us to be more resilient. We were so happy to see them displayed in our room.

We have also been thinking about the 3 school rules. Can you remember them?

In Primary 3 we have done quite a mixture of learning this week.

We moved on to learning about parts of the ear in Science but, we have to do some more exploring of the ear next week.

We still had some Art work to do with the eye. So, we used 2 different types of media for this. First of all we thought about what we can see with our eyes and we made this picture with coloured pencils and black fine line with felt pen.

Next we made an eye collage with material. We thought this looked like an easy activitiy but, we had to do lots of problem solving and we had to work hard to make our cutting neat and accurate. It was fun using the tiny material scissors to cut through the fabric.

We had fun comparing and contrasting our two styles of eye Art.

We also made our Christmas card designs even though it is still September! We really enjoyed listening to  the Christmas music as we designed them.

In practical Maths we measured strips of paper to make half a metre. It was tricky handling the long metre sticks and we have been working hard at sharing the equipment with others and waiting patiently for our turn. The fun part was using the half metre strips to measure different objects around the classroom.

Our teacher modelled some writing for us this week and our focus was on a best friend. We had already made a labelled plan and this helped us when we wrote on the lined paper. Although we find writing challenging we are so proud of ourselves when we read it over at the end and look at the lovely handwriting we have too.

We are going to add the last line to our writing on Monday. Then it will be fun to share our writing with our friends.

We have been becoming more creative in our play this week and we have been using our imaginations to add some props to the dragon models and making our own maps for the cars.

Something new for Primary 3 was voting for our Pupil Council reps and the Sustainable Squad reps. Everyone was very sensible and kept their voting private. this made it a very fair process and everyone is happy with the results.

We did a whole class vote for Recycling rep and we are looking forward to getting started in our new roles of responsibility.

Yet another busy working week for Primary 3. Well done everyone!

We made our River of Life display for our Resilience work in Health and Wellbeing.  We discussed things that make our life happy and things that make our life a little bit more difficult. We made our own boats to navigate the river.  Next week we will discuss some of Skipper’s tools that help us with challenges in our life.

We started our length measure work and identified items in class that were longer than, shorter than or about one metre in length.

We have worked hard on our descriptive writing about My Friend following the structure of the descriptive text type.

We have worked this week on the spelling pattern short e using different graphemes (ea, ie).   Our tricky word was – measure.

Our science topic is the senses.  We finished off the sense of sight by creating a collage eye.  We learned the names of some of the parts of the eye:  the pupil, the iris and the sclera.   We also wrote our names in braille which is used for blind people to read.  Ayla’s great granny used to translate books into braille.

We also made an eye colour bar graph.  The most popular eye colour in P3 is blue.

We started to learn about how we can hear with our ears.  There are three tiny bones in our ears;  the stirrup is the smallest bone in our entire body;  the hammer and the anvil.  (Ayla).  There is a snail like part of the ear called the cochlea and it has little hairs which move when sound vibrates.  (Drew)   The ear drum vibrates and helps us to hear. (Mia)

In numeracy, we have been working with the sequence of numbers up to 1000.

In our novel, The Boy who Grew Dragons, the dragon has now hatched from the fruit.