Welcome to Oak 3!
2025 – 2026
Mrs Bayliss/Mrs Bowker - Class Teachers
Mrs Sullivan, Mrs Oldham, Miss Gregory - Teaching Assistants
Spring 2
Volcanoes and Earthquakes
This afternoon, Year 3 enjoyed a lovely walk to Polesworth Library. Once we arrived at the library, we spent some time exploring the shelves and looking through lots of different books before choosing which ones we wanted to borrow.
Oak 3 loved sharing their books with the children in Redwood class, as part of our 'buddy reading' on World Book Day.
This half term in Year 3, we have been learning all about volcanoes — how they form and the different parts (crater, vent and chamber)
One member of Oak class took this learning a step further at home by creating his very own erupting volcano! Using a simple but exciting experiment with bicarbonate of soda and vinegar, he carefully built a model volcano and then demonstrated how it could erupt.
When he brought his creation into school, all of Year 3 gathered around to watch the experiment. Everyone was excited to see the volcano come to life as the bubbly “lava” foamed and flowed down the sides of the model. It was a fantastic way to bring our classroom learning to life and helped us all understand more about how volcanic eruptions work.
We are very proud of the effort and enthusiasm shown in this piece of home learning. Well done for sharing such a creative and exciting project with the whole year group!
Using our new knowledge of latitudinal and longitudinal lines, we worked together to plot the volcanoes on the giant map. Two volunteers walked the length and width of the entire world to find just the right spot!
To introduce our new topic, our Year 3 junior geologists participated in a rock detective walk around our school. We began to recognise the different types of rocks, their physical properties and their uses.
Spring 1
Forces, Magnets and Metals
Year 3 have been busy creating delightful breakfast pots as part of our learning about cereals. They chose a mix of yoghurts, fruits, and cereals to combine in their pots. The children thought carefully about how to present their creations, ensuring they looked as tasty as they were.
Oak 3 put their understanding of forces to the test with an exciting challenge. Each child was given a paperclip and asked to make it move in four different ways, but they were only allowed to touch it for two of those movements. The children confidently applied their knowledge, using pushes, pulls and even blowing air to create contact forces. They also explored non-contact forces by using magnets to move the paperclip without touching it.
Ten of our Year 3 children represented Birchwood at the North Warwickshire Gymnastics competition. We were extremely proud of the confidence they displayed while performing their individual floor routines and vault jumps. The team did brilliantly, finishing 2nd overall in their heat and achieving a 1st place win on the vault. Well done to everyone involved!
This week, Year 3 proudly presented their class assembly to the rest of the school and their loved ones. The assembly focused on online safety, linking perfectly with Safer Internet Day, which takes place in a couple of weeks’ time. The children did a fantastic job learning and delivering their lines, as well as performing a song and a poem with confidence and enthusiasm. Their hard work and teamwork really shone through, and they should be very proud of themselves.
We hope that everyone in the audience enjoyed the assembly and, most importantly, learned something new about how to stay safe online. Well done, Year 3, for such a brilliant performance!
Year 3 planned their own investigation to find out how different materials affect how far a car can travel. We learnt that the force ‘friction’ slowed the cars speed when rougher materials were used.
To kick start Oak 3's learning journey this half term, we entered the classroom to discover a range of materials scattered all over the floor, and the whole area taped off with warning tape! There was also an enormous metal footprint next to the items. There were materials such as metal, fabric and plastic. We had a detailed discussion about what these items could be, where they could have come from and why they were here. After our discussion, we noticed a piece of writing hidden in the room, which described an iron man falling off a cliff. We think we may have discovered our new book, The Iron Man by Ted Hughes.
