MY… animals

MY… animals

Originally uploaded by Bright Side

I hope that you had a chance to visit the MY… exhibition at Modern Art Oxford over the past few weeks. Our class really enjoyed our visit there and it was wonderful to see our own artwork exhibited. The children felt like real artists, which was wonderful. I popped in there today to have a last look round and I’m pleased to say that our animals were attracting a great deal of attention. One child (who looked about 6 years old) was hugging the cow, followed by the sheep. She said that they were fantastic- I have to agree!

VoiceThread

I thought that some of you might like to see an example of VoiceThread, to give you some idea of how it has been used. Here we have a photograph of our class mascot, and we have added text and recorded comments to it. This was just a go at using the software, so the comments aren’t groundbreaking or profound, but it does show how the children can all interact and comment on a photograph or video. If you have a look on the VoiceThread site there are some interesting uses of this by teachers. I particularly like the class book reviews. I think that this could have a use as a podcasting tool, so we’ll be looking into that next.

Newsletter- week ending 26th September

Dear parents and carers,

This week in maths we’ve been looking at how we can use number facts to twenty to help us solve calculations using larger multiples of 10 (for example, using the fact that we know that 4 + 3 = 7 to work out that 40 + 30 = 70). We’ve also started practising these skills using word problems.

In English we’ve been continuing with our work on Viking myths and legends. We’ve been exploring the story of Loki and Idun through drama and ICT. On Thursday the children used a new piece of software called VoiceThread to record character dialogue to go with photographs of them acting out scenes from the story. They did a fantastic job and the results showed that they really understood the story structure and character roles.

In my role as ICT co-ordinator I’ve been looking at ways that I can communicate with you and keep you better updated with what is happening at school. I’ve set up a blog which will have information about what’s happening in class, as well as an online diary which shows important dates and events. The blog currently features some photographs of our displays, and it will also contain this newsletter.

This is the last week that I will be sending out paper copies of this newsletter- the School Eco council are very strict on paper usage! If you would like me to e-mail you a copy each week, please drop me an e-mail at class3.appleton@googlemail.com and I will put you on the mailing list. Please note that I do not reply to e-mails sent to this address, so if you need to talk to me or ask a question please come into school to see me. A printed copy will be available for you to read on the noticeboard outside my classroom if you can’t access it on the internet or by e-mail.

Today I have explained the homework task to the children. They are very excited about the opportunity to work in the way that interests them, although there is a little trepidation at the scale and length of the task. To help the children who are feeling a little unsure I will be running a homework club on Wednesday lunchtime next week to help them discuss their ideas. I’ll run another one in a couple of weeks if they have any more questions and to see how they’re getting on.

Mrs B

Three things to ask your child this week…
1: How would you describe the character of Loki?
2: What do we do when we squish words together?
3: What was in your healthy meal design?

Our Classroom

In class 3 we like our classroom to be bright and colourful. I like to showcase the children’s work as well as include interesting facts and objects related to our topics.

I know that not all of the parents/carers have been into class yet, so I thought I’d share a few photos of our display boards.

The first board you see as you walk into the room contains the passports to class 3 that the children completed on the icebreaker day. It also has some of the lovely coats of arms that they drew to represent themselves.

At the bottom of the frame you can see the fantastic laptop trolley that we were using today in our ICT lesson.

The next board is our recycling board. It contains lots of posters that they children made to explain how and why you should reduce, reuse and recycle. The objects to the bottom right include recycled and reused materials, and there are some relevant books available too.

Our target board is in our book corner. Each child has a rocket containing their target for this term.

The final board is our topic display. As you can see, our topic this term is Vikings:

Each child has written a question that they have about the Vikings onto a speech bubble. I’ll photograph some of those questions for another post, but suffice to say that some are thought-provoking and some are downright hilarious!

Welcome to the Class 3 Blog

I thought I’d try a new communication method- blogging. I’ll be sharing updates on what’s happening in Class 3 here, as well as sharing diary dates and upcoming events. I’ll be encouraging my class to also post examples of their work here. Please feel free to comment on our posts and let us know whether what we post is useful.

For starters, I’ve made my Class 3 Google calendar public. You can find it here. It will have important dates like school trips and so on, as well as any other information that I think will be useful for parents.