On entering school this morning, children in Year 3 were shocked and amazed by what they found in the Y3 classroom. Tables were overturned, books were scattered on the floor and most surprising of all, a mysterious, mythical creature had decided to make its nest in the classroom. Using our inference skills, we deduced that the gigantic, golden egg might belong to a dragon. Newspaper reports to follow- watch this space! 
Year three ended our geography volcanoes topic with a BANG! We concluded our learning about volcanoes by creating our own chemical reactions to mimic the eruption process.
Children in Y3 (both at home and in school) have been investigating the effect that different liquids have on our teeth. To do this, we used egg shells to represent the teeth and placed these in plastic cups filled with a variety of different liquids. We left the eggs to soak for a week before closely observing and comparing the egg shells! It’s safe to say we will all be thinking twice before drinking sugary drinks and will make sure that we clean our teeth regularly to protect them. Before carrying out our experiment, we considered how we could ensure that it would be a fair test and also made our own predictions about what would happen. 
Year 3’s science topic this term has been “Light and Dark.”
As part of this topic, we have been investigating how shadows are formed, with the end goal of creating our own shadow puppet performance. We discovered that shadows are formed when light from a source is blocked by an object. Opaque objects created the “best” (darkest and most defined) shadows and so we decided to use black card to make the puppets. We also investigated how the distance between the light source and the object effected the size of the shadow.
Today marked the culmination of all our hard work/experiments, as Year 3 worked in groups to practice and perform their own shadow puppet shows. We had lots of fun watching each others shows while learning about shadows. Well done Year 3! 
Year 3 have started learning about the 7 continents in the world. We practiced locating these on our balloon “globes.” To help us do this, we first added the equator around the middle of the balloons to use as a reference point. A few balloons may have popped but the children all had fun learning about the geography of the world in a hands on way. 
Year 3 have been learning all about the prehistoric monument Stonehenge. As part of our art lessons, we decided to recreate Stonehenge in our art work. First, we practiced sketching Stonehenge using shade and tone. For our final piece, we created a sky background with a silhouette of Stonehenge on top. For the sky background, we used pastels in different shades of blue or orange and and blended the c
olors with our fingers. Don’t they look fantastic!
Yesterday afternoon, Y3 were having lots of fun experimenting with different types of rocks. We tested the rocks in several ways to find out more about their hardness, permeability and density. Before the experiment, we made predictions about which rocks would float (low density) and which would sink (high density.) 
In February, Year 4 all entered the BBC 500 words story writing competition. Every child in the class worked extremely hard on their entries and I am incredibly proud of all their efforts. One student in particular however deserves an extra round of applause for their achievement.
Yesterday, I had an email from the BBC 500 words to say that Kate had made it through to the next stage of the competition. Out of over 135,000 entries, only 5000 stories have been shortlisted and Kate’s is one of these. Well done Kate- lets hope you make it through to the final 50!
