Emmaville Primary School

Southern Europe Year 3

Welcome to the Southern Europe Year 3 Class Page.  Here, you can find out about everything that we've been doing this term.

W/b 20/10/25

Prayer Spaces

This week, we were lucky enough to have our prayer spaces session in the dance studio, where we were able to do lots of fun activities! There was a plasma ball, where when you touched it, it would make a line to your finger and move with it, even if more than one person touched it at the same time! While we did this, we also had a chance to think about what this tells us about God, which we wrote on a post-it-note and shared on a whiteboard.

There was a tent set up, where we could go and have some quiet time and wrap ourselves in a nice blanket and think about how lucky we are to have all the comforts that we have. There was a station set up with playdough, where we were able to make things that we were grateful for. We had lots of great ideas, like our families, friends, pets and our favourite foods! Another station was for us to write our goals, such as what we want to be when we grow up, on a coloured piece of paper which would make a rainbow when we put them all together. The final station was a game of hook the duck. On the bottom of the duck, there was a number and we had to look on a sheet to find the number, it would show us something to be grateful for, such as food, our friends or our families. A great session was had by all!

This has been a great (and very busy) first half term, I would like to add that it has been a lovely way to end the half term by meeting so many of you this week and getting to have a chat! I hope you all have a lovely half term and we will see you all again in November, ready to go again!

W/b 13/10/25

Science – Muscles

In Science this term, we have been learning about how to keep our bodies healthy and how animals can stay healthy. To start with, we looked at what some animals eat and how there are three types of animals – carnivores, herbivores and omnivores. We also learned that plants can make their own food through a process called photosynthesis! Then, we learned how animals transfer energy to each other through what they eat and designed food chains to show this.

Then, we looked at the eat well plate and what foods are good for us. We learned that all foods are good in the right amount, and that we should have more of some foods than others to stay healthy. We also had a look at how much energy we get from different foods and which ones are best for us!

After that, we learned all about skeletons, why we have one, why they are important and how we have endoskeletons, while some other animals have exoskeletons, as well as how some animals are vertebrates (have a backbone) and some are invertebrates (do not have a backbone). Recently, we have made some models to show how muscles work in pairs when they are attached to the bone. For example, if our bicep stretches, our triceps on the other side of our arm, will relax and vice versa!

What a great first Science topic this has been!

W/b 6/10/25

DT – Stone-Age Houses

In History this year, we have been learning about the Stone-Age. This has tied in with our DT topic, where we have been learning about and making Stone-Age houses! A couple of weeks ago, we looked at the differences and similarities between modern and Stone-Age houses, which were very different, before learning about what these old dwellings were made out of, why they were made the way they were and what they would have in them. Then, we designed our own dwellings, first on paper and then using a laptop!

Last week, lots of us brought in sticks and were given pieces of clay so that we could make our own Stone-Age houses! We had to mold the clay into the shape that we wanted and use the sticks to help with our designs. We had to use our growth mindset as there were times that things did not go to plan, but we kept trying and maybe changed our designs a little bit, but we got there in the end! Over the past week, they have dried and some things may have fallen or changed as it dried, so this week we had a chance to edit and finish our dwellings! We have had great fun making these and they all look fantastic!

W/b 29.09.25

Poetry Week

This Thursday, 2nd October, was National Poetry Day. To celebrate this, we had a full week of studying, writing and enjoying different poems and different types of poetry. On Monday, we studied a really funny poem called ‘Word Play’ by Michaela Morgan. We loved this poem because it played with some words and mixed them up in funny ways, like “Is a butterfly a fly, made out of butter?” We then used this as inspiration to create our own poems!

On Tuesday, we had a poetry workshop online where a poet called Tom Roberts showed us the process he uses to write poems and talked about remembrance and helped us to think about what remembrance means for us. On Wednesday, we learned a poem called ‘Skateboarding’ by Joseph Coelho. This poem described, very vividly, the feeling of going skateboarding with one of your friends with descriptive language. Then, we thought about fun times that we had played and used some of the techniques we learned from Joseph Coelho to write our own poems.

On Thursday, we warmed up with some nice games to get us thinking about play and gave us a chance to play with words, like a question game and word association games. Then, we learned about the AABB rhyme scheme and how it can work. We used this to help us write our own poems based on what we can hear in the classroom, on the yard and, using our imagination, outside of school. Finally, on Friday, we took the poem that we liked most from this week, either one that we wrote or studied, and  performed it for each other.

What a great week we have had celebrating poetry!

W/b 22/09/25

English – Elf Road

We have just finished our first big write in English, and it was a very exciting story to start the year with! A few weeks ago, Mr Robinson got an email from Mr Hamilton showing a little portal in school, but when we went to see it, it had disappeared! We talked about where it could have lead and who could have used it. We had so many ideas and were so fascinated, that we decided to start learning about portals, which we did through a portal story called Elf Road.

This was a story about a boy called Billy, who found a door when walking one day which lead him to a magical land. We learned the text really well and came up with actions to help us to remember it. Then, we looked at some of the different techniques that were used, like commas in a list, similes and comparatives. Then, we started to come up with our own ideas for portal stories. Over the past week, we have been using these ideas to write our own stories, including all of the techniques that we learned through studying the Elf Road text. We have been to all sorts of magical lands and seen lots of different kinds of creatures!

W/b 15/09/25

Guided Reading

It has been another busy week in Year 3. We have done all of our usual job, but we have also had music workshop come in and do a fantastic workshop on songs from films! This week, we have also continued to study our guided reading book, The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon by Minnie Grey. This story has lots of great visuals and has been so much fun to read!

It is based off the nursery rhyme ‘Hey, Diddle Diddle’. In this story, the Dish and Spoon hear their song and decide to run away with each other, going on lots of exciting adventures and putting on shows for lots of people to see. Eventually, they fall on some hard times and spend lots of time apart, before reuniting at the end. This week, we have finished reading the story and talked about all the questions we still had and what we thought happened after the end of the story.

We have had a fantastic time learning about this story so far and we cannot wait to see where it goes next!

W/b 8/9/25
 
Comparing Dwellings
 
This has been another fantastic and busy week in Southern Europe! We have started our first English text, which is a portal story called Elf Road, we have done some great work in maths when adding 3 addends together and beginning to learn our times tables, as well as learning about our region of the North East of England in Geography!
 
On Thursday, we started our DT topic, where we were learning about Stone-Age dwellings. We learnt how people in this time period would have made their houses, what shapes and sizes their homes would be and what they would be made of. Then, we compared these with modern day houses, which we would live in, and they were so different! I wonder where this topic will take us next...

W/b 01/09/25

First Week in Year 3

Wow, what a start to Year 3 this week has been! It is always a big jump moving to the next year group, but the children have been fantastic in getting settled into a new classroom, with new teachers and we are so proud of all of them! We have spent time this week talking about what we would like and what we would not like to happen in our classroom, designing our dream classroom and our nightmare classroom.

In Geography, our learning has been centred around the name of our class, Southern Europe. First, we learned about some of the countries and used our Atlases to place them on a map so we knew where all of the countries were. Then, we learned about the capital cities and had a chance to draw the flags of each of these countries. Finally, on Friday, we did some food tasting where we could try some different foods from different Southern European countries! We tried:

  •         Pitta bread and tzatziki from Greece.
  •         Raisin brioche swirls and brie cheese from France.
  •         An authentic Italian sausage, which was actually brought from Italy!

We have all had a great time getting to know each other this week and I am sure this is going to be a fantastic year in Year 3!