Mercury Class is one of our Year 3/4 classes, led by Miss Gethings.
Remember: Homework is given out on Wednesdays and is due in the following Monday. We encourage children to read as regularly as possible, and expect their school reading book to be read at least 3 times a week and recorded in their planner. PE days are Tuesday and Friday and children should come into school wearing their PE kits on these days.
This term our topic is extinction where we are looking at the timeline of significant periods in history with a focus on… DINOSAURS!
In art we have been studying cave art by discussing what this can tell us about this period in history and recreating it by pretending we are in a cave under our tables, using the medium of chalk and charcoal.
We then moved onto using oil pastels where we first practiced different techniques and then used these to create a dinosaur eye. Take a look!
We have learnt that the skeleton is very important, it protects us, supports us and allows us to move.
Here, we recreated the human skeleton using art straws, labeling some of the main bones and answering some interesting facts about the human skeleton. Did you know the smallest bone in our body can be found in the ear?
In Science this term, we are looking at ‘animals including humans’. We started by looking at the 5 main food groups and why they are needed within our diet. For this particular lesson we brought in empty food packages and and looked at what information the nutritional value gives us from the labels. Some of us compared the nutritional value of different items thinking about which has more or less of a certain nutrient. This was especially interesting when comparing a similar food such as different brands or types of crisps or cereals.
Take a look at how we presented this information in some of our groups.
Our space wow day was so much fun!
First we used our learning and some research to create a poster about life as an astronaut, then we used the computers to program a microbit into a rocket count down. After that, we went in the planetarium, it was amazing and were learnt lots of new facts. Finally, we set of some effervescing rockets in the playground, it was an extremely wet day but it didn’t spoil our fun!
In Science, we have been looking at the topic ‘LIGHT’. This lesson, we did an investigation to see which materials and colours would make the best astronaut suit so that our friends could see us in space! Here we are testing some objects and materials from around the classroom in the dark, using a torch to see which is the most reflective.
During maths this term, we have been looking at number and place value. Part of this involved us representing numbers in different ways, including numbers on a number line.
Take a look at some of our number line learning where we took part in an Active Maths lesson. We played different games where we had to represent numbers to 1000 on a number line!
For National Poetry Day, we looked at compound words and had fun creating funny pictures to go with them. For example, flowers growing on the sun for ‘sunflower’.
We also created some of our own poems around the theme of ‘play’. Some of us performed these to the rest of the class.
We have started our art this term by looking at different collaging techniques such as tearing, scrunching and curling. This is an example piece of work where we explored these techniques. We have planned our own extreme earth collage where we will apply these techniques. Keep your eyes peeled for some of our final pieces!
Here are some examples of work explaining the stages of what happens when a volcano erupts!
In Science we have been looking at examples of when we want friction and examples of when we don’t. For example, we don’t want friction when playing on a slide but we do want friction between our shoes and the floor to avoid us slipping over.
We carried out an investigation to see which materials have more or less friction by attaching different materials to the bottom of wooden blocks.
Our new topic this term is ‘Extreme EARTH’! We started our topic learning by finding out about the layers of the Earth and parts of a volcano.
Today in English we enjoyed our hook lesson to engage us in our new unit of work. Our next genre of writing is a wishing story.
We played an exciting game to put ourselves in Charlie Bucket’s shoes to see what it feels like to take risks. When our name was drawn out, we chose an envelope from the table. We could then decide if to stick with the envelope we chose or swap it with somebody else’s. In suspense, we revealed what was in the envelope and waited in anticipation to see who won THE GOLDEN TICKET!!
We went on a whole school trip to The Deep to extend our learning for our topic ‘Under the Sea’. Take a look at some of the amazing things we saw and got up to over the day!
In English, we are writing a warning story and using part of The Little Mermaid as our model text and to base our writing around. During this lesson, we were focusing on using ‘show don’t tell’. This is where the writer uses clues such as body language, facial expressions and action to show how a character is feeling rather than directly saying it. In pairs, we created a freeze frame showing the contrast of emotions between Ariel and Flounder before exploring the shipwreck and how we could show this through body language. We then had a go at writing some of our own. Take a look at some of our freeze frames, can you work out who is Ariel and who is Flounder?
In Science this term, we have been learning about the digestive system, teeth and food chains. Below is a picture showing the results from our whole class egg-speriment we carried out. We put 4 eggs into 4 different liquids (vinegar, water, orange and coke) to see how it would impact the egg shell which has similar properties to enamel on our teeth.
We have also made paper chain food chains where we looked at what the producer and the consumers are.
This term, our topic across school is ‘Under the Sea’. We love this topic!
