Year 3 News
Book Week
This week we celebrated Book Week. We dressed up as our favourite character in a book. Costumes ranged from Dog Man to Where’s Wally?, and Hermione Granger to Oompa Loompas.
In turn each grade paraded around under Sherril’s Shed in their costumes while music was playing. Mrs Purton interviewed a few people in each grade asking questions like; “Who are you dressed up as?” and “What’s your name?” It was fascinating to see what everyone was dressed up as, some people were dressed in the same costume as someone else, while others were unique.
It was lots of fun and we are glad that we could have one this year.
We read quite a few books from the shortlist and completed these activities.
What Do You Call Your Grandma?
In this activity, we read a book called ‘’What Do You Call Your Grandma?’’ by Ashleigh Barton. It was a very interesting book and had us all really eager to get started with our very own ‘’What Do You Call Your Grandma?’’ book.
We all came up with a few things that were special about our own grandma. We then drew a picture of our grandma. We made sure it was clear where our grandmas were from and what made them special.
Walk of the Whales
Walk of the Whales, by Nick Bland, is a shortlisted book for 2022 Children’s Book Council of Australia.
Today we read it, and we sure understood why! The book is about whales coming out of the ocean and trashing the land. But they only came out because of humans!
The whales had come out because the ocean was way to polluted. The humans cleaned it up, and the whales happily dove right back in. After we’d read it, we all logged in to our laptops, excited to be able to choose how to lay out our information. The task was to find out what the differences and similarities in between whales and humans [us!].
Some kids did Venn-diagrams, others did tables, some brain-maps. There were plenty of videos and lots of information about whales. It was a really entertaining task. Thanks, teachers!
Think Tank Exhibition
To celebrate the end of our unit of inquiry “How the World Works” we set up for an exhibition. We presented our Think Tank ideas to all the Year 3 students.
We stuck up our information report posters and displayed our prototypes. The information report posters included a heading & logo, the innovators’ name and a bit of information about their life, instructions on how the Think Tank innovation works, a picture of the prototype and what drove them to innovate it. We visited each class and it was great hearing about everyone’s ideas and seeing the different way people presented their information.
Hopefully one of these ideas will become a reality one day.
We used WeDo 2.0 Lego this week. Lego WeDo is a robotics hardware and software platform specifically designed for primary school students.
In this activity, pairs were given 1 WeDo pack and a computer to use. You had to go onto the instructions, and then you used the WeDo pack (which is a Lego pack) to make what was on your screen. Don’t worry, there were instructions!
So, you make the Lego creation, and then you have to connect your WeDo creation to the computer via Bluetooth. This step, however small, is really important. When you’ve done that, you go on to the second half of the activity, which is coding. For the coding, you had to drag blocks that did specific functions onto the pause/go block. Your robot could do pretty much anything you coded it to do.
WeDo was really entertaining!
WE HOPE YOU ENJOY THE VIDEO
Race Around the Zoo
To start off our new unit of Inquiry, Sharing the Planet, Year 3 did an activity called Race Around the Zoo. The Race Around the Zoo was a very interesting activity. We watched a virtual tour of the Melbourne Zoo, and then had to answer questions about the animals. Some of the questions were:
- What enclosure holds some of the deadliest snakes?
- How many Sumatran tigers are left in the wild?
- What animal can you smell before you see?
It was so, so, so, entertaining!
Here is the link if you want to visit the zoo virtually.
This virtual zoo activity would have come in handy during lockdown when you couldn’t physically go to the zoo.
Thankfully now we can have excursions again and we are looking forward to visiting Healesville Sanctuary next term.
