Scissett CE Academy
Year 3 Archive Blogs
Cleopatra Spring 2023
Botanical Art
Year 3 are focussing on plant art on Wednesday afternoons with Mrs Whittle. This week we discussed botanical artwork and developed our own observational drawing skills. We chose to use softer black pencils in order to try and create texture and tone.
Rocks, Gems and Fossils
Class Cleopatra had a visit from Rev Mike, who brought in his amazing collection of rocks, gems and fossils. They were beautiful, like the amethyst crystal. Mason thought the igneous rocks were really cool, especially the obsidian.
Lois said 'This makes me want to forage for fossils now.'
Hand to Mouth
Class Cleopatra had a wonderful time when Hand2Mouth came for a workshop. We learned all about illuminated manuscripts, including the Lindisfarne gospels, and then had a go at creating our own, using the Lord's Prayer as a focus. It was really interesting and lovely to have a calming time to create something beautiful as well. Even Mrs B and Miss Stone had a go!
Cleopatra Autumn 2022
Journeys and Challenges
Michelle Bennett (mbennett) on: Cleopatra Autumn 2022
This week, Class Cleopatra had the chance to go on an Amazing Journey around the theme of Creation, set up for us by Alison from Hand2Mouth. Everyone was really keen to take part, and we had lots of different activities to try, while thinking about the earth and Creation. We put our fingerprints inside the outline of a dove, created a collaborative painting by filling in a shape with the colour representing our favourite “down-time” activity, and wrote prayers on paper which we then folded up and placed on a bowl of water – they opened up as we watched! We could also plant seeds in a little pot and take them home.
We also had the treat of some of our Mums coming into class on Thursday for a special Reading event. Mrs B showed them - and us – a bit more about reading in Year 3, and our VIPERS work. We then had time to read in partners, either with our Mum if they had been able to come, or with a partner in class. The grown-ups all said they found it a great way to find out more about reading at Scissett!
Finally, this week, we had our last Invictus lesson in PE. Mrs B set us the challenge of turning over a sheet while we were still standing on it! We had to work with our team-mates and communicate our ideas well. She then asked us if we could repeat the challenge without being able to stand up - that was really hard!
Read, read, read!
Michelle Bennett (mbennett) on: Cleopatra Autumn 2022
This week has been an exciting time for Class Cleopatra – we got to see a real live author (through a Zoom virtual event!) We are one of hundreds of schools across the UK and Ireland to have partnered up with this event, which has been created by a group of bookshops, including our local bookshop, “Read.Holmfirth”. We met author Sophie Henn, who has written lots of different fiction books. However, this event was about her non-fiction series, LIFESIZE.
We were all amazed by the fact that the pictures in Sophie’s books are all life-sized, showing us that an elephant’s toe-nail, a panda’s face and a giant squid’s eyeball are all about the same size as each other, and much bigger than the bumble-bee humming bird, which is only about 5cm in length! We had good fun spreading out an 18m piece of string to show how big the giant squid is altogether – it was HUGE! And did you know that a giraffe’s tongue is 45-50cm long, and is grey/purple coloured so it doesn’t get sunburnt reaching up to the top branches and leaves on the acacia trees?! Sophie also showed us how to draw a red panda, which was really fun.
And on the subject of Reading, some of us are already working hard towards our Year 3 Reading Challenge. Look at all the different types of text that Mrs B has challenged us to try before we leave her class!
Harvest Festival and Being Forceful!
Michelle Bennett (mbennett) on: Cleopatra Autumn 2022
Thursday (29th September) was a special day – we held our first Harvest Service in school after lockdown that we could invite our families to share with us. The whole school sang some fun songs as part of the service: Cauliflowers Fluffy, Autumn Days, Carpenter, Carpenter and Harvest Samba. Reception and Years 1 and 2 performed “The Farmer Plants the Seeds” and the Key Stage 2 classes performed “When your Father made the World.” Mrs B thought we all did really well and the sound was fantastic. Class Cleopatra also performed a poem that we had been working on in our English lessons, called Autumn is Here. Mrs B combined lines and phrases from 20 different children’s poems to make a collective one, and we worked as a team to perform it to the families who came to watch. Mrs b was very impressed with the vocabulary we had used (we are focusing on good word choices in our writing and Book Study work this half-term). What do you think?
Also, this week, we carried out the Science Investigation we had planned last week, trying to work out how to test whether we need more force to pull an object over a rough surface or a smooth. We used force meters to measure how many Newtons it took to pull our objects on our smooth tables in class, and also over the rough grass outside. It was great fun working with the equipment, and making sure that we kept our test fair!
Going for gold!
Michelle Bennett (mbennett) on: Cleopatra Autumn 2022
This week has been a big week for being sporty and keeping fit…
On Tuesday, we all worked hard in a PE session with Mr Kinnock and Mr Hanson from Kirkburton and Scissett Middle Schools, doing “Quad Kids”. We had to try our best to run a really fast sprint, a steady long-distance run, achieve our longest throw and make our longest standing jump. The teachers keep our scores and see how we improve from year to year.
On Tuesday evening, some of us went with Miss Goodall up to Shelley College to run in the Year 3 cross-country event. We were really proud of all our runners, especially Maisie, who won her race against all the Y3 girls in the other first schools, and will go on to the next race at Newsome in a few weeks’ time, to compete against other Y3s across Huddersfield.
And, of course, on Thursday we had our usual Multi-skills lesson with Mr Kinnock, working on lots of different skills and building up our stamina, and on Friday we had our PE session with Mr Burrows. This half term, we are doing a topic called “Invictus”, linked to the Invictus games which use the power of sport to inspire recovery, support rehabilitation for wounded servicemen. We have been thinking about how different games and sports can be adapted for players with different needs.
This week, we have also been thinking about what makes our school great, and what a real “Nightmare School” would look like. We drew our ideas, and Felix and Darcy showed what pupils who went there might look like!
Being Thankful
Michelle Bennett (mbennett) on: Cleopatra Autumn 2022
Our Prayer corner in Class Cleopatra is linked to being thankful. We have all been invited to write something we are thankful for on a leaf and hang it on the prayer tree. Look at how many things we have thought of already! Jake and Alex think it looks great!
