We have reached the end of term 1 and it's hard to believe the children have been in Year 3 for 7 weeks already. They have had an incredible term where they have all worked extremely hard so we would like to wish them a restful and fun half term break.

English

In English this week we have been learning about an Ancient Greek myth called The Story of Athena and Medusa. We have focussed on character descriptions this week and have learnt how to describe both appearance and personality. In this myth, Medusa, a very vain and foolish girl, is turned into a hideous monster with hair of snakes, so she made a fantastic character for us to describe! We enjoyed thinking of verbs and adjectives to describe the snake hair such as hissing, writhing, slithering, rattling and revolting, vicious, scaly, smooth. We have also focussed a lot on how we should start sentences when describing characters so that we didn't keep starting with she/her/Medusa. We used some fantastic sentence openers such as;

On top of her head, she has...

All over her body, Medusa has...

Slithering frantically,....

Angrily biting, the snakes......

Maths

In maths this week the children have learnt to apply their skills in the 4 operations ( +, -, x, ÷ ) to solve word problems. They remembered how to use the bus stop method brilliantly for the division problems but found the grid method for multiplication a little trickier so we spent more time practising this.

Topic

In topic we have been thinking about the effect that humans can have on the environment, learning about how island hopping has impacted on some islands in Thailand. The children were able to show opposing viewpoints for this problem.

We have then had a very arty rest of the week where we have used watercolour paints to create an island sunset silhouette postcard, used batik technique to create a fish picture, and thought about scale to create an island stamp.