Base 3 News

100% attendance this week in Base 3 — Fantastic!! Let's keep that up and earn some more Golden Tickets.
We were sad to say 'good-bye' to Miss Hindmarch this week but we wish her lots of luck in her new job and look forward to the postcard she has promised to send us to let us know how she is getting on. Having said that, it has been a fabulous final week together.

In Literacy we have continued to focus on writing setting descriptions. We began the week looking at a short film called 'Marshmallows' — the children watched the first 8 seconds and then shared what they saw and what they thought was happening. We moved onto thinking about the sounds we would hear in a forest and looking at how to make a setting description flow rather than jumping all over the place. The children were challenged to include prepositional phrases and conjunctions to extend their sentences as well as using powerful vocabulary. Each and every one of the children rose to the challenge and wrote truly amazing setting descriptions which made me go 'Wow!'. I'm hoping to see some more of their fantastic creative writing in their homework stories.

In Maths, we completed our work on area and perimeter and are now moving on to consolidating our understanding of the four rules of number. The children have worked really hard and facing their own individual challenges and overcoming them. For the last few weeks we have been starting our day with 'Fluency in 5' which gives the children an opportunity to rehearse and practise their basic number skills — they love it and often stretch themselves to complete both the Year 3 and the Year 4 questions. As a result they are all showing more confidence in Maths lessons and are also showing super improvements in their times table challenges.

We've been having some arty fun in the afternoons. We began by researching what Batik art is — a batik seller was mentioned in The Firework Maker's Daughter — the children discovered that batik is art created by drawing a picture in wax and then dying fabric. We created our own version of this by drawing our designs (based on volcanoes or fireworks) onto fabric using glitter glue, once these were dry we then painted the fabric using our chosen colours. We have now dissolved all the glue which has revealed the original fabric below and so leaving our own version of batik — we have a super display in the classroom thanks to Miss Hindmarch.

We are looking forward to another busy week next week — here's hoping for another 100%.