Year 3

We welcomed our wonderful new Year 3 with a fantastic day of teambuilding fun and activities in the outdoor classroom. Everyone enjoyed working with their new housemates and couldn’t wait to be in the Middle School together. The term was filled with so many highlights from a tour of an ancient farm at Butser to learn about Roman villas and lifestyles to a fantastic theatre production at the Minerva in Chichester of what became a much loved story, The Butterfly Lion, by Michael Morpurgo. Finally, a trip to the pantomime at the King’s Theatre in Southsea to enjoy their amazing production of Aladdin topped off a very successful and productive term of hard work and learning.

Writing to our favourite authors was a wonderful experience especially as so many received responses, including Alexander McCall Smith who wrote Freddie Mole, the Lion Tamer. How thrilling it was! Everyone loved learning about forces and magnets in Science and developed some real strength in all our investigations. The children loved learning to swim at the Senior School and couldn’t have been more excited to get to the new year for their gala.

In the Spring Term, we launched our mountains topic in Geography and began learning about mountains in Great Britain and then did a whistle stop tour around the world, culminating in a fantastic project to create some impressive models and collages. We enjoyed experiments and demonstrations to see how mountains were formed. Everyone loved all our work on Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox, especially the story writing and collage making together. We enjoyed many more of Roald Dahl’s stories too, with some children claiming to have read them all! We loved learning about light and shadow in Science this term, even working in the dark at times to investigate some theories.

When it was time to begin our next topic of Roots and Shoots we were grateful for our brand new greenhouse to help with investigations. It was also time to enjoy meeting schools on the rugby and hockey pitches in team matches. Earth Song came to visit for an amazing Chinese New Year workshop. The lion dance was so impressive and the drums were very loud! We managed to see 3M’s wonderful assembly on recycling before lockdown and 3P shared their happiness video with the whole school joining in.

And then lockdown began, and didn’t they do well? We can’t quite believe almost an entire term of home learning took place this year. The children embraced it all with such resilience and motivation. So much learning happening and the opportunity to meet online and share our experiences of these strange times. Highlights of this term were: artful flowers, nature projects, Sports Day, play writing, creating stories and non-fiction work. The children worked hard on the ocean project competition, researching and creating some imaginative stories and fantastic models using all sorts of materials with great resourcefulness and learning about marine biology and Captain James Cook’s adventures to discover the Great Barrier Reef. Guided reading time to enjoy The Sheep-pig by Dick King-Smith was a highlight in our Google Meet groups.

We were thrilled to see so many in our Year 3 bubbles for the last few weeks of term, a welcome chance to see our friends and teachers and say congratulations, good luck and farewell to Year 6.

“writing to our favourite authors was a wonderful experience especially as so many received responses”