St Joseph's Catholic Primary School, Thame

We also had a fun day on Monday making melting snowman biscuits, our Bambinelli and some hanging Christmas tree decorations. We enjoyed one of our biscuits whilst listening to our class story and took the other home for later.

Today we had our Bambinelli blessed by Father David. The children were very respectful and alongside Year 4 listened very well to what Father had to say. We hope you enjoy looking at them when they come home this week.

14/12/2020

Last week the children enjoyed mummifying a tomato. They cut the top off their tomato and scooped out the insides, just as the Egyptians would cut and take out organs. They then helped to weigh out and mix salt and baking soda to form natron, which was poured in and around their tomato. We have been checking in on our tomatoes to see what has happened to them and if our predictions were correct. So far our control tomato has gone mouldy, but our mummified tomatoes have not. Maybe you could ask your child to describe their tomato to you?

07/12/2020

Year 3 have been getting very creative AGAIN in our Ancient Egyptians topic. We are so proud of our creations that we just had to share them with you. Canopic jars were used by the ancient Egyptians during the mummification process to store and preserve the viscera of their owner for the afterlife. We created our own canopic jar heads. For this we used newspaper, masking tape and then we sprayed them gold.

We also made cartouches using clay and painted them. A cartouche is an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic name plate. It's shaped like an oval with a horizontal bar at the base of the oval and a king's name written inside of the oval.

We are sure you will agree that they are just AMAZING!!! Thank you to all Year 3 parents for your support with bringing in materials for this. We hope you like our creations!

01/12/2020

Last week Year 3 created their own papyrus paper. We learnt about how the Ancient Egyptians used a water weed called papyrus to make a form of paper in ancient times. We didn't exactly have the weeds, but we cut brown paper into strips and used a mix of PVA glue and water to stick the strips together, ensuring we overlapped and layered them.

Once the papyrus had dried we chose an Ancient Egyptian God or Goddess to draw onto our own paper. We're sure you'll agree the results are AMAZING! Well done Year 3!

16/11/2020

Year 3 have 'kick started' the term during our football lessons. All the children have been really enthusiastic during our sessions and it has been great to get outside whilst the weather is still being kind to us!

The children have been learning lots of different skills, including; trapping a ball and cushioning it when receiving it from a partner, how to move into a space after passing a ball to a partner and how to retain possession once we have received the ball. The children will continue to develop their skills whilst learning new ones throughout the term and they are looking forward to their first match!

13/11/2020

This week in Year 3 we had great fun making our own cartouches, which we learnt is an Ancient Egyptian name plate that would be placed on a sarcophagus. The children looked at some hieroglyphics and worked out what their name would look like using them. They planned and designed their cartouche before making it using clay. We rolled, cut and scored our clay in order to recreate our designs. I'm sure you'll agree they did an amazing job!

15/10/2020

Year 3 have had a great week of learning – we have been finding out lots of geographical facts about Egypt. We enjoyed taking part in some excellent role play based on the story ‘The Egyptian Cinderella’.  Tomorrow we will begin planning our own stories based around this. We also had a very interesting debate about the story and we then sorted parts of the story into arguments for and against it being a happy tale for Rhodopis.

Year 3 were very lucky this week as we received some beautiful new books.  Thank you so much to The Friends of St Joseph for our books.

One series of books we received were called ‘Flying Fergus’ and these were written by Olympic champion Chris Hoy and award winning author Joanna Nadin, they were illustrated by Clare Elsom.  Clare heard all about our new books…. and she wrote Year 3 an email (please see below).

Hello Year 3 at St Joseph's!

My name is Clare Elsom, and I'm an author and illustrator. I've worked
on lots and lots of books, including drawing all the pictures for the
Flying Fergus series. A fun fact - I drew over 700 pictures for the
Flying Fergus books... that's a LOT of bicycles!

I hope you enjoy your reading, Miss Ogden has told me that you're such
a great class and how much you love your books.

Please see below for a picture of me with the rest of the Flying
Fergus team when we went on Blue Peter.

If you're interested, you can see more of my work on my website at
www.elsomillustration.co.uk

Very best wishes,
Clare Elsom

09/10/2020

On Monday Year 3 kicked off our new Ancient Egyptians topic. We had an amazingly fun day!

The children shared what they already knew about the Ancient Egyptians. They looked at some artefacts, investigating, inferring and posing questions about them.

They also had the chance to investigate some rich and poor ‘Ancient Egyptian poo’!

We had fun completing a hieroglyphics code breaking quiz/hunt. The children worked together to answer questions, reveal words and then decode them to work out the Ancient Egyptian proverb.

We also enjoyed a mummy-making competition. We joined Year 4 outdoors to see who could make the best mummy. It was tricky and required lots of team work. We had some amazing results!

What a fabulous start to our new topic. Ancient Egyptians, we’re ready for you!

30/09/2020

We've added some amazing posters to our wow wall that the children created as part of our 'Here We Are' work. The posters were all about how to help the environment and the children came up with some brilliant ideas and designs!

They also enjoyed creating some beautiful pictures of the Earth inspired by the book's illustrations and content. They look stunning! Well done Year 3!

In science we had great fun doing some experiments that highlighted different aspects of the importance of soap; especially in these crazy times! We focused on the scientific skill of prediction and the children predicted what they thought would happen in each experiment and then followed up with the results, saying whether they were right or wrong and why.

To begin with we tested what happened when we put our finger into water with pepper floating on top, then what would happen in the same dish but with a finger covered in soap.

We also did the 'magic milk' experiment and we got to use cotton buds with soap on to make the food colouring dance around the milk. Both of these experiments showed how the soap pushes dirt and germs away.

We also investigated the best way to wash our hands and get rid of germs. We used a dry paper towel, a wet one, cold water, warm water and warm water and soap to wash the germs (glitter) off. The dry towel did a better job than the wet one. All waters got most germs off, but only the soap got them all and cleaned dirt off our hands too!

Finally we did an experiment where two children had a 'germy' (glittery) hand. The first washed their hands before shaking hands with the next person on their team. The other did not wash their hands between. We then repeated again and compared the third child's hand. Washing between touching certainly did an amazing job, no germs! But those who didn't wash spread the germs to the next person and the next person...

Soap is super, Year 3 will certainly be using lots of it!

25/09/2020

Year 3 have been very busy looking at different sacraments in R.E lessons. This week we researched what happens during a Baptism ceremony and the order in which the events of the ceremony happen. We also learnt about the roles and responsibilities of the people that attend the ceremony. We then enjoyed using drama to act out the different parts of the ceremony, in the correct order.

Here are some photos of our ceremonies:

9th September 2020

Year 3 have had an amazing first week and have been absolute superstars! We have been working through our 'Here We Are' sessions and the children have responded really well, sharing their considered thoughts and opinions. We have written a poem about our favourite place and are in the middle of writing a letter to a person that is special to us.

In maths we have had fun discovering who stole the pencil case, how to escape the forest and doing some code breaking, all whilst working as a team and refreshing our maths skills.

We have had fun learning all about the brain and how our minds and eyes can be tricked. You can take a look at some of the illusions below. Today we learnt a little bit about Alexander Flemming and the discovery of penicillin. We worked in pairs to design our own experiments, trying to grow the most mould. We thought about what we will need and how to make sure it was a fair test. We can't wait to see some results!

Optical Illusions Powerpoint - boggle your brain!