Cherry class exploring French Christmas traditions- 16.12.20
Today in French, Cherry explored how France celebrated Christmas. We found it interesting that a yule log in France is a special log that is put on the fire so if Mary and baby Jesus needed a place to stay there would be somewhere warm for them. We also found out that in some areas of France it is a tradition to have 13 desserts as part of their Christmas meal.
After learning about France and their traditions, we began using our knowledge of French to create Christmas pictures. We use our French numbers, colours and shapes to help us. If we were unsure what a French word meant, we used our learning value resourcefulness to figure it out by using books and bilingual dictionaries.
Today, Cherry had a lot of fun crafting and creating. In the morning, we designed and created spinning tops. We discussed the best ways to create our spinning tops and whether the disc would work better at the bottom or the top of the cocktail stick. After experimenting with different designs, we soon discovered that a shorter cocktail stick with the disc close to the bottom worked the best.
In the afternoon, we creating christmas decorations out of wire. We learnt that using different forces we could bend and twist the wire into different shapes.
Finally, Mrs Jeffery kindly brought in an embossing machine which allowed us to stamp different patterns into paper. We thought it was a lot of fun and it is something we would like to do again in the future.
This week, we started our new topic- Mighty Metals! To introduce our topic, we investigated what forces were needed to make different apparatus on the fit trail move. We discussed that our legs were doing most of the hard work pushing and pulling to make the fit trail move. We even found a piece of equipment that required us to twist! What objects around your house need a force to move? Can you identify which force it is?
As part of our revist to Land Ahoy, we have been designing pirate flags. We learnt about what different symbols represent on flags before having a go ourselves. We first drew a draft of our flags on plain paper before block printing them! We had a lot of fun, perhaps you can have a go at home. If you would like to try block printing at home, there is a video on the school blog.
This afternoon, Cherry have been working in small groups to research and create a poster about oceans. They have had to use many of our learning values including collaboration, relationships and resourcefulness. We learnt about where our ocean can be found, what creatures live there, what the climate is like and we found out three interesting facts we would like to share with our peers. Later in the week, we will finish our posters and then present what we found to the rest of the class!
Year 3 have been set new home learning that can be accessed through the Google Drive. The homework is based on our new topic (Metals) that we will start next week!
Mrs Jeffery and Miss Halloway look forward to seeing all the home learning!
This afternoon, Cherry class were learning about continents. We have been learning about them all week but today had to match the correct continent picture to the correct word. We were able to look at the different continents and spot different shapes that made that continent up. It was quite a challenging task because we had to make sure the pictures were the correct way for us to make a guess but we were resilient until we matched the cards up correctly. We had a lot of fun and we are enjoying learning about the world!
Today was our heroes and villains day!
We had a lot of fun dressing up as different heroes and villains. As part of the day, we played a few rounds of Captain America/Ladybird Girl says before having a go at relay races as part of hero/villain bootcamp. Unfortunately, the rain came and we had to go back inside our classroom. We did not let the rain dampen our spirits as we then continued our PE lesson inside performing superhero dances.
Later on, we had a look at real life heroes and had a discussion of how each hero had impacted the world before placing them onto a timeline.
A huge thank you to everyone who got involved, there were some excellent costumes!
Today, Cherry class have been stretching out their muscles through yoga. We listened to The Twits by Roald Dahl whilst we performed our yoga. We had a lot of fun being the monkeys, painting the ceiling as a giraffe and being Mr Twit himself. Afterwards, we had a little yoga disco!
Today, Year 3 had a special visitor as part of the school’s ongoing celebrations leading up to World Book Day this Thursday. Alina Constantine, a bilingual story teller, read to the children an exciting story in Romanian and English.
The children also learnt some Romanian key words and took part in freeze frame activities to show case their new learning- linked to the MFL curriculum.
As part of PSHE “Respecting Differences” the children were also given insight into aspects of Romanian life and culture.
Year 3 and 4 had the most amazing time sampling a wide range of foods connected to China. The teachers were especially impressed by all of the lovely sharing that took place (as well as children being very daring with trying new things!).
Please have a look at this short video we made to remember the event:
Cherry Class had great fun this morning exploring the new Chrome Books. Huge thanks to the PTFA for funding them – they are brilliant!
Year 3 and 4 experienced life in a Chinese School today – they started the day by singing the National Anthem and marching on the playground, spent ‘morning exercise’ doing aerobics (no playtime today!), had Chinese-style literacy and maths lessons, practiced some calligraphy, and rehearsed their dragon dances. The extra long lunch break included listening to a story and sampling some delicious Chinese food – huge thank yous to everyone who helped prepare it!
We had great fun, but agreed that life in an English school compares quite favourably! In particular, the novelty of standing and bowing to show respect to any adult entering the room soon wore off!
Here are some photos of Cherry Class enjoying the day – see the other blogs for lots more!
Bingo with Chinese numbers!
Fortunes from our homemade fortune cookies!
Ben the Bear has had a lovely start to the holidays, but is really missing his friends in Cherry Class. Today, he’s been having fun with Ginny the dog – he’s very envious of her Christmas jumper!
After a term spent doing lots of reading, these are the final positions on the reading tree. Look how many children exceeded their targets and ended up on the ceiling!!
Cherry Class are thoroughly enjoying their afternoon swimming sessions at Dawlish Leisure Centre. Even though we are only a few days in, many children have improved their swimming skills greatly.
As our part of hook for our Fantasy story topic, we headed to Ness Beach in Shaldon for the morning.
The children were encouraged to imagine the tunnel down to the beach as the portal to a new world. After the long, dark trek, we feather mapped all the senses vocabulary to help during future writing opportunities.
Once on the beach we explored all the rock types as an introduction to our science focus.
Despite the rain, we had a great morning! We came away eager to get writing our fantasy stories and to find out more about rocks!
Today, we celebrated World Book Day by dressing up as our favourite book characters from stories written by Roald Dahl.
Our chosen book was ‘The Twits’ and we spent the day emerging ourselves in the text with fun and exciting activities.
One of our main activities was to re-create a scene from the book using puppets. We made our own puppets and backgrounds, wrote scripts and then recorded the whole scene on an IPAD.
Children who have been taking part in Mr Hardee’s gymnastic club were selected to represent the school in a competition against the other schools in the learning community at TCS.
The 22 children selected from year 3 and 4 all had to learn a floor routine including forward rolls, cartwheels and challenging balances such as arabesques. Furthermore, they had to perform a vault. All children were judged and their scores go towards their team’s total score.
It was mentioned by the organisers of the competition that the children were impeccably behaved setting a super example! Mr Hardee is extremely proud of them.
We we find out the results tomorrow so look out for the blog!
