Week 12-13

Dear parents,

A further update to class life in 3W.

Science:

We started our first Science unit on the human skeleton. Our first lesson was an investigation in discovering how our bodies and bones moved when using a jump rope. 

We went on to guess how many bones we have in our whole body. Our class came pretty close with a guess of around 220. Please ask your child how many there really are, I'm sure they will be able to tell you.

Today we looked at the scientific terminology of each bone and labeled a large skeleton poster together. 

Tomorrow we will be putting together our very own puzzle of Mr Bones. This will help us to know how our bones fit together.

We have been asking ourselves some important questions:

Do our bodies and bones move when we jump rope?

How do we know they move?

Where are our bones?

How do they move?

What is their job?

Next week we will be dissecting owl pellets! Fun!

Reading and Writing:

For the past couple of weeks we have have been learning all the features of non-fiction information texts. We discovered that most information texts have very different features to fiction texts.

I'm sure your child will be able to tell you at least 5 features they have found in non-fiction texts.

This skill has been scaffolding our second writing unit on non-chronological reports (expository, non-fiction writing). 

The children have started to build concept maps of an area they feel they are an expert in, trying to jot down as many notes on post-its to see if they have enough information to produce a report. 

In the next week we will be trying our best to write as much as we can about our expert topic in paragraphs. We will then be ready to organise and find appropriate headings for each paragraph before revising, editing and re-writing our facts onto Microsoft Word. 

Math:

We have just finished our unit on place value and time. Partitioning large numbers, organising and discovering which numbers are larger and smaller were all objectives that were covered in this unit.

We also learned to add 2 and 3 digit numbers using the place value chart to help us exchange our large numbers. 

Telling the time is always a tricky topic, and this will be coming up constantly during the year especially as it is a much needed skill. Reading both the analogue and digital clock are important as well as calculating the passing of time. 

You can help by asking your child how long it took to... or if we went to the shops at... and came back at... how long did we take? There are so many real life situations to help us learn how to use and read time. 

Next week we will be starting our 2D shapes and area unit. 

Thanks for reading!

3W