Latest Class Newsletters and Resources

This term, our topic is ‘animals’ in art. We enjoyed learning clay skills such as making balls, slip and joining.

We had a very sweet surprise this morning, as we met some chicks! We enjoyed stroking them and listening to them churp.

On World Book Day, our theme was bedtime stories, therefore we wore pajamas! We enjoyed an authorfy masterclass from Sarah Lean, focusing on her story ‘The Good Bear’. She set us the writing task to draw a wild animal, annotating to show its backstory. We also enjoyed a quiz, stories read by Mr Griffiths and Mr Batchelor as well as doing draw alongs with illustrators.

We had a brilliant time making a variety of healthy snacks as part of our DT unit ‘Fresh Food, Good Food’. These snacks included sweet potato crisps, fruit salad and homemade hummus with vegetable sticks. We learnt about good practice when preparing food as well as why the snacks were healthy, and of course, we got to try them at the end! We evaluated them and discussed variations we could do to improve them.

As part of our Geography unit, ‘Misty Mountain, Winding River’, we learnt about the journey of a river. We then made posters in pairs to draw diagrams.

In our new unit in English, we are writing instructions. We are beginning by writing instructions to make a den. In order to help us, we went onto the field and followed the instructions to make dens in small groups!

Yoga!

Take a look at our beautiful Christmas themed art!

During our Christmas activity week, the children wrote some lovely winter stories.

KS2 performed a brilliant carol service this week for parents to enjoy in the church.

The whole school enjoyed a fantastic trip to Noah’s Ark Farm. We saw lots of amazing animals, stroked goats and had fun on a huge slide!

We loved making a web out of facts from the ‘Storm Unicorn’; an information text we studied.

We enjoyed a morning painting butterflies using watercolour paints. The children took great care, following instructions and mixing colours to create the desired colours.

During the autumn term, Sapling class have covered place value and column addition and subtraction in Maths. In English, we studied the story ‘The Lost Happy Endings’, focusing on the poetic language. We wrote our own endings to the story. We then enjoyed writing pet and animal poems and published them into a class anthology.

This term, year 3 have enjoyed forest school on Friday afternoons. They have done shelter building, bug hunting, fire making and lots more!

2021-2022

The topics we covered last year were: Through the Ages, Rocks, Relics and Rumbles and Emperors and Empires. We always strive to make learning enjoyable and engaging for the children and topic work is just one way in which we do this.

Today was our art day. Our theme was summer, so we focused on the artist David Hockney, copying his image ‘Pool and Steps’. We chose to use watercolours to imitate the colours he had used. After that, we made collages depicting a summer scene or object.

This term, we have started learning about botanical art. We began the project by finding out what a botanical artist is. We then studied leaves and flowers closely and sketched them, adding annotations and swatches of the colours.

Somerset Cricket Day

We were lucky enough to have a visit from Somerset Cricket in May! The coach lead us for an assembly and a range of different workshops throughout the day! We had such a great day – Thank you to Sean and Somerset Cricket!

London Trip – Matilda

We had the opportunity to go and see Matilda the Musical in London! We set off at normal school time on the coach, had a short tour of London led by Mr Batchelor, had a picnic lunch in the theatre, then SHOWTIME! Thank you to those that helped to make this possible and to those that helped. We even managed to sneak in a Burger King on the way home. Thank you – what an incredible day!

During RE day, we had a brilliant time, exploring spirituality and water. We looked for links between humans, planet earth and God (we are made of water, Planet Earth is made of water, God is made water). We shared some Bible stories, including the creation story and the story of Noah, and explored spirituality and water across different areas of the curriculum. These included, creating music based on how water makes us feel, art inspired by our relationship with water, stained glass windows based on conserving water, writing poems about water and how it makes us feel and how it linked us to God. We also explored our School Vision of Let Your Light Shine.

On World Book Day, we had a wonderful time dressing up as words! We had a parade to celebrate and explain the definitions of our chosen words. After that, the children got to chose a book which was read by an adult. In Sapling Class, we listened to some writing tips from the author Laura Ellen Anderson, who set us the writing challenge of designing a spooky character and the story map they were from. Finally, we enjoyed virtually joining Michael Rosen’s live World Book Day performance!

To kick start the spring term, the children wrote some wonderful fables! As always, we worked through the full writing process and the children had control over what their fable was about and their chosen moral. To begin each writing project, we first look at ‘mentor texts’ and consider our product goals by identifying the common features. Some of the product goals for our fables were: having a clear moral, keeping it short and snappy, a character learning the hard way, and the two characters having a conversation before and after the lesson had been learnt.

I was really impressed by the children’s mini books and some of the writerly techniques they used, including trying out different story openers when revising and looking the blurbs on books to help them write their own.

As part of our Rocks, Relics and Rumbles topic, we did a soil investigation to find out what type of soil can be found in our field. We discovered it was clay soil and had lots of fun in doing so, getting our hands muddy!

We had lots of fun on Science day, making skeleton puppets and bridges using paper. We learnt about the different names of bones and tried out different ways of folding the paper and using various resources to make the best bridges possible!

Publishing party to celebrate and share our brilliant fables!

During the last week of term, we had a lovely time doing lots of Christmas activities! These included making Christmas cards, calendars, dancing, having a very special visitor and Christmas maths code cracking.

The children throughly enjoyed Wellbeing day this term. They worked wonderfully together in mixed age groups. They did lots of activities which they now know can help to support their wellbeing. These included baking cookies, mindfulness colouring, yoga and meditation, listening to stories, team building tasks and art!

For our Remembrance Service, Sapling class made poppy paintings using watercolours to share, as well as a wreath to leave in the church. Sprout Class did some lovely readings whilst Oak Class read poems.

Religious Education

In RE this term, we are focusing on God and Incarnation.