Year 3 News

Year 3 News Written By 

Caitlin and Annabel 3B

Maths

The Four Cube Houses

Today we were architects and investigated multiple ways to place four houses [actually small cubes] together, following these rules:

1. All cubes must be touching face to face
2. There must be no cantilevered structures
3. All the houses must be different and cannot be made ‘’different’’ by rotation around a vertical axis

We got into pairs and trios and collected 4 cubes at a time. Then, we put the cubes together to make structures. 

Our brains were hurting a lot as we struggled to find all 15 solutions. We had to keep in mind what we had just been leaning in maths which was slides, flips and turns.  

Lastly we attempted to draw 3D pictures of the structures. It was very challenging but lots of fun.

Inquiry

Year 3 Arcade

In our current unit of Inquiry of 'How the World Works', we have been learning about how humans are driven to imagine, construct and invent. To introduce the topic, we were asked to create our own arcade game, inspired by Caine’s Arcade. How cool!

First, we collected the materials we needed from home. We then had to come up with the “Steps to success” for our games.  The first step was to plan, draw and label our arcade games in our sketch books. We then constructed, tested and adjusted our arcade games. The next step was to write clear, simple instructions.  Lastly we made a poster advertising our game. 

The teachers invited the Year 1 students to came in and play our games.  They had a wonderful time playing games such as Shooting hoops, Ticks and crosses, Hit over the penguins and Bean bag toss.  

We really enjoyed this project and hope we can do more of them in the future.

The Kronkiwongi

Do you know what a Kronkiwongi is? Well we didn’t either!

 A Kronkiwongi is anything you want it to be. There are no rules. We had to let our imagination run wild. 

The three questions we had to answer were; What is it? What does it do? And How does it help people? 

It can range from Rainbow bananas that shoot you to the other side of the world to cars made completely out of lollies. 

Some people struggled at the beginning as we are not used to freeing our minds and having no rules. We had a great time designing and labelling our Kronkiwongi’s. 

Basketball Tower

We have had a busy few weeks using our imagination to plan and construct a variety of items. In this project, we had to build a tower that would support the weight of a basketball for 20 seconds. 

Sounds easy, right? Well, not that easy when you add you have to make it out of just newspaper and masking tape! 

There were a lot of different designs, but we quickly figured out the best way to make newspaper strong was to make it thick. There were a lot of different methods used in order to make it thick, such as:

1.        Folding it

2.         Scrunching it

3.         Rolling it

In the end, most of the towers survived the 20 seconds. We found it really fun to work with our friends in this challenging but entertaining activity.