W/b 30/03/26
Egg Decorating
This week in Year 3, we had a wonderful time getting creative as we celebrated Easter by decorating eggs together. The classroom was full of excitement on Monday as everyone prepared to turn their simple eggs into colourful works of art!
The children explored a range of techniques, using bright paints, patterns, and decorative materials to make each egg unique. The children’s creativity really shone through. It was lovely to see how proud everyone was of their finished creations, even if some of them required patience and perseverance.
We also took some time to talk about why eggs are a symbol of Easter, linking our creative work to the wider celebration of new life and springtime.
Today, we found out the winner of the competition for our class and were very proud of them, but everyone should be proud of their own designs as they were all fantastic!
Over the past two weeks, Southern Europe class has been busy designing and building our very own drawbridges to defend against a Viking invasion.
Using cardboard and carefully prepared templates, we constructed the different parts of their bridges, showing great creativity and problem-solving skills along the way. We worked thoughtfully to assemble our designs, using masking tape to securely join the pieces together.
One of the most exciting features of the project was creating a working drawbridge mechanism. We used string to allow their bridges to lift and lower, some of us even incorporated a winding mechanism to control the movement. This hands-on experience helped us understand how real drawbridges work, linking our design and technology learning with engineering concepts.
Throughout the project, the class demonstrated fantastic teamwork, resilience, and attention to detail. It has been wonderful to see their ideas come to life, and we are incredibly proud of their finished creations!
Thursday 19th March 2026
Adam Bushnell – Anglo Saxons
Yesterday, our class had an exciting visit from Adam Bushnell, who led us through a fantastic Anglo-Saxon workshop packed with history, creativity and storytelling.
We began by learning all about the Anglo-Saxons, including their striking flag – a white dragon set against a bold red background. Next, we explored how Britain has changed over time using the book ‘A Street Through Time’. We travelled from the Stone Age right up to modern day, before focusing in on Anglo-Saxon life. We discovered the different jobs people had in a village and what everyday life might have been like during this period.
One of the highlights of the workshop was getting to handle and examine a range of real-life artefacts. We passed around and discussed items such as a rabbit fur blanket/hat (depending on how you use it!), a pig skin belt, and even a pig skin water bottle, which had been made waterproof using beeswax. We also looked at chain mail gloves, a nasal helm, a shield, arrows and a quiver, as well as a seax (a long knife) and a knife with a sharpening stone. This gave us a real sense of what Anglo-Saxon warriors and the normal people in the village might have worn and used.
Using these objects as inspiration, we then explored the idea of kennings – descriptive phrases made from two words, often ending in “-er”, such as “head crusher”! We created our own imaginative kennings to describe the artefacts, helping to bring them to life through language.
After that, Adam showed us how to draw a dragon step by step. We used our artistic skills to create our own unique dragons, each with its own look and powers.
Finally, we combined everything we had learned to create a storyboard. We imagined an Anglo-Saxon warrior battling a fierce dragon, using our dragons and ideas to plan an exciting narrative.
It was a brilliant day full of creativity, history and imagination. We learned so much about Anglo-Saxon life and had great fun becoming authors and illustrators ourselves!
Thursday 5th March
World Book Day!
What a book-filled, costume-tastic day we had celebrating World Book Day! Everyone had a fabulous time and the classroom was full of excitement about books and reading.
We began the day by talking about our favourite books and explaining why we enjoy them. The children proudly showed off their wonderful costumes, sharing why they had chosen their character or telling their friends about what they like to read when they are cosy in their pyjamas. We also had a look through the special £1 World Book Day books that the children can buy using their book tokens.
One of our favourite activities was the Ultimate Character Battle. The children chose a book character and described their strengths, weaknesses and special characteristics. They then used their brilliant speaking and listening skills to debate which character would win!
Before lunch we took part in Choice and Voice. Each child chose from the 4 books being read by the phase teachers, and visited the classroom where it was being read. It was lovely to see children from both Year 3 classes and Year 4 enjoying stories together with others who had made the same choice.
In the afternoon, we read poems from our Year 3 World Book Day book, The Dog Is Full of Love. Inspired by the poems, the children wrote their own haiku poems about dogs. A haiku has three lines with 5 syllables, 7 syllables and then 5 syllables again. The poems were creative, thoughtful and lots of fun to read.
Later, we completed a 10-minute creative challenge with author and illustrator Frann Preston-Gannon. After listening to her read one of her books, the children drew an animal that had found itself in a tricky situation, such as a snake tied up in a knot! This was a very fun and imaginative activity.
We all had such a wonderful day and went home feeling inspired and full of enthusiasm for books!
W/b 16/02/26
Art – Plastic Sculptures
This Half Term has been a very busy one, particularly in Art. Over the past 7 weeks, we have been learning about sculptures. We learned about an artist called Andy Goldsworthy, who would go into nature and use some natural resources he could find to make different sculptures (as well as having some more permanent works). We learned about some of his most famous works and how he would have to take pictures as evidence of them, as they could get destroyed in nature.
A couple of weeks ago, we would bring in our own sticks and leaves to make our own sculptures in the style of Andy Goldsworthy. We did this over two weeks and could make different sculptures both weeks. Over the past two weeks, we have been looking at a different artist called El Anatsui, who uses recycled materials to make sculptures, showing how things can be used more than once rather than being thrown away. We used this as inspiration to create our own sculptures out of recycled materials, which we brought into school and made over two weeks. We used different things to join them together, including glue, masking tape and staples.
This Friday, we also had a very special treat with our marble jar treat, where we put our comfy pajamas on, brought in our cuddly toys and watched a film. A lovely afternoon was had by all!
Tuesday 10th February 2026
Safer Internet Day
This week was a very important day in the calendar, Safer Internet Day. This is a day that happens once per year to promote staying safe online. Each year, there is a different theme and this year’s theme was ‘Safe Use of AI’. AI is becoming more and more common in our daily lives, so we need to know how to safely use these programs. We learned what a chatbot is through a BBC Live Lesson, where we created a chatbot for vultures, which would give information about vultures to anyone who asked.
Then, we learned about some ways that we can use AI, such as Alexa and other chatbots. We learned that there are some ways which are safe that we should use AI for, like to play songs with Alexa or ask a question we do not know the answer to. We also learned there are some ways we should not use AI, like to do any of our homework for us or to make silly pictures of our friends. Finally, we used everything we learned to create posters showing some safe ways to use AI.
Friday 6th February 2026
Visit to The Glasshouse
Today, Year 3 had a very exciting Friday! We got on the bus at 10 o’clock and made our way down to The Glasshouse. We arrived at 10.50, where met by the people who would be guiding us. First, we were split into two groups, Northern Europe and Southern Europe. In Southern Europe, our first activity was to get a tour of the building. We were able to see both of the Sage rooms (where performances happen), a room for rehearsals and even got a surprise performance from a class of people learning to play the ukelele!
Then, it was time for lunch (thankfully, we were all starving!). We all sat and had lunch with our friends in our common area.
It was then time for our Barbour workshop. For this, we learned about different notes and the different sections of an Orchestra; string, percussion, brass and woodwind. We would roll a dice, which would give us a number between one and twelve, which we would use to select a note. Once we had 4 notes, we could put them together to make a harmony. We did this twice, before we used these notes to bring in the different sections of the orchestra (on a computer) to play them. This helped to create long, scary sounds, which sounded like it would go well with a big monster in a film!
After a short break, we all got back together for a very special treat. We got to be in the audience for an open rehearsal by the NRFH. It was amazing to get to see these talented musicians perform live!
Sadly, that was all we had time for on this trip and we had to get back to school. This was such an amazing trip and we are so glad we were able to experience it!
W/b 26/01/26
Computing – Emails
Over the past few weeks in our Computing lessons, we have been learning a very useful skill, how to write emails! Our first lesson is all about what an email is. We learned that an email is an electronic form of communication, like a letter that you send to someone over the internet rather than through the post. We learned about email addresses and that funny @ symbol that we use in them, the subject line and how that is a title for an email and how we normally structure an email and write them to people. We finished this lesson by writing an email to one of our friends in the class and delivering them to them.
The next week, we looked mainly at the email address that we have to enter to send an email. We found that this is really important to make sure our email gets sent and goes to the person that we want to send it to. We found that there are many different places these emails could end up if we do not enter them right. They should go to the persons ‘Inbox’, but could go into our ‘Undelivered’ box if it is not sent right. We had these boxes set up around the room and we wrote an email to Mr Robinson, before placing them in the ‘Sent’ box. They would get checked for the email address and if they were correct, they would go to his inbox and he would receive them. If not, they would bounce back into our ‘Undelivered’ box, and we would check the email address, correct it and send it again.
This week, we were learning about adding attachments to emails. We learned what an attachment is, where you can add something on to an email, such as a picture or a document. We then got our emails back that we sent last week, a piece of paper and a paperclip. With our piece of paper, we were able to draw a picture to go with our email, add it to our email with a paperclip and send them to Mr Robinson again. Mr Robinson then took them from his ‘Inbox’ and read some of our emails our loud!
W/b 19/01/26
National Handwriting Day
It has been another very busy week in Southern Europe class this week! On Friday, it was National Handwriting Day. In our class we are always encouraged to use our best handwriting, but today we got a chance to focus and show what our best handwriting really looks like. First, we talked about how we do our best handwriting: sitting up straight, having a nice sharp pencil, keeping our paper flat on the table and applying the appropriate amount of pressure when we put pencil to paper. Then, we had a look at some finger exercises to warm up our hands, like you would warm up before a sport! Finally, we read a poem called ‘Others’. We chose a line from the poem and wrote it in our best handwriting, using all the things we had practiced before. Then, we had a go at writing the full poem, taking our time to make sure our presentation was as good as it can be. At the end, we were able to decorate the page as well.
Everyone tried their best to produce their best piece of work, well done Southern Europe!
W/b 12/01/26
PE – Gymnastics
This week has been another busy week in Southern Europe! This half term, on Thursday mornings, we are going to the dance studio to do some gymnastics. Last week, we learned the importance of stretching, as this will help us to avoid injury when doing gymnastics. After our stretches, we started to learn about point balances and patch balances. We learned that a point balance is a balance on a small body part, like a foot or a hand. There are lots of different versions of these, for example, three-point balances have three small parts of your body on the ground, like two feet and one hand. We had a practice at lots of different types of point balances, and some patch balances, which are on a big body part, such as your back. Finally, we made a sequence with two-point balances and two patch balances with our partner!
This week, we moved on to looking at jumps. We learned that when we jump, we should land with our hands in front of us, our heads pointing forwards and our knees bent, feeling the tension in our muscles. We practiced this technique before moving on to some different types of jumps. We had a go at a straight jump, a star jump and a tuck jump. When we watched our partner do these jumps, we would give them feedback on what they could do differently to improve their jump. We so much fun and everyone worked really well together!
W/b 05/01/2026
Maths – Angles
After a lovely Christmas break, we have come back this week with renewed energy and had a great week in Southern Europe! In maths this week, we have been learning about different types of angles. On Monday, we used two pieces of card and a split pin to make some ‘angle checkers’, which we used throughout this week in our lessons. We also learned about three different types of angles; right angles, acute angles (smaller than a right angle) and obtuse angles (bigger than a right angle). We used our angle checkers to show these angles.
On Tuesday, we learned about different types of shapes, triangles and quadrilaterals. We learned that a triangle is a shape with three sides and three angles, while a quadrilateral is a four-sided shape with three sides. We drew some of these in our books and used our angle checkers to see what kind of angles these shapes had. On Wednesday, we learned that a right angle is also a quarter turn. We used our angle checkers to find right angles in the classroom and to navigate a treasure map!
Finally, on Thursday and Friday, we learned some more about quadrilaterals. We learned that a rectangle is a quadrilateral with four right angles and two pairs of equal sides. We also learned that a square is a quadrilateral with four equal sides and four right angles.