Spring Term 2024

Autumn Term 2023

Our first topic in Year 3 was learning all about life in prehistoric Britain, from the beginning of the Stone Age right the way up to the end of the Bronze Age. To begin our topic, children spend the afternoon examining the contents of a coprolite to figure out what Stone Age people had eaten as part of their diets. The children enjoyed working in teams to dissect the coprolite and uncover the remains of the food that was hidden inside the rather squishy treasure-troves!

We visited the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Nottingham during the Autumn term, where a team of experts from Creswell Crags taught the children about lots of different aspects of Stone Age life. The children were tasked with excavating artefacts from the five different periods of the prehistoric age, as well as creating some fantastic pieces of Stone Age artwork that they were able to bring home with them. All the children enjoyed dressing up in authentic Stone Age clothing, and worked hard to identify the uses of some rather obscure farming artefacts.

In our English lessons, we wrote a set of instructions for how to wash a particularly dirty – not to mention stubborn – Stone Age animal. The children completed different drama tasks to establish the correct order of steps that were needed to scrub a woolly mammoth, and then used this information to write a fantastic set of instructions that included lots of adjectives and imperative verbs.

In preparation for the Autumn harvest festival, we were visited by a very strangely dressed lady – it was Mrs. Bowyer’s mum, who arrived at school wearing her bee-keeping outfit! We spent a morning together with her, learning about all of the different roles that specific bees had in a hive, and thought about the process by which bees are able to make and store honey. We used the information from the talk to create a short roleplay that we presented to the rest of the school at our harvest festival.

Year 3 worked hard in their Design & Technology sessions in the Autumn term to design and build some special keepsake boxes for a local museum. We were asked to design a storage solution for some priceless Stone Age artefacts, and so the children took time to research which box designs are best, looked at joining techniques and designed templates. Finally, they built their prototype keepsake boxes out of cardboard and decorated them with appropriate imagery so that the museum would know exactly what was being stored in each box!