Year 3

Welcome to our Year 3 page.

We are a class of 31 children led by Mrs Heatley, Mrs Kealey and Mr Voller. We are a very musical class and enjoy singing and playing our recorders. We are also terrific at maths and English, and to make sure we keep ourselves healthy we take lots of exercise. One of our favourite lessons is swimming! Each week we walk to Prince Henry's Grammar School and have a swimming lesson in their pool. We have a great time, though it wasn't always like this......when we first went swimming we were very apprehensive. Some would say terrified..... As you can tell from our initial photograph....the horror!

But after only a few weeks everyone agreed that the lessons were going, well, swimmingly!!

Our instructors are very kind and helpful and everyone has learned so much. We are very grateful to Prince Henry Grammar School too, for allowing us to be their guests. We always make sure we are polite and sensible visitors and we enjoy visiting their huge school every Friday. Here you see year 3 ready to walk back to school as completely relaxed, happy swimmers!

“At first I was really nervous as I had never been in that much water before, but now I know there was no need to be nervous because I like it” said a very happy member of year 3!

We are a Catholic school and take great pleasure in showing the world how much our faith means to us. God is at the centre of everything we do and one way we show this is by taking turns each day to create a special prayer table for us all to gather and pray around.

Our topic this term has been The Stone Age and at first we were rather unsure about whether we would enjoy this, but in true year 3 style we worked our hardest and found that we are really enjoying it and there is a lot for us to learn. We made the recess in our classroom into a very realistic cave and it was good fun having our groups working in the cave, we also did some cave paintings (because of course if you have a cave that is millions of years old you need cave paintings) and after studying the way people lived in the Stone Age, we were able to make some Stone Age dwellings from clay and twigs.

We all thoroughly enjoyed our Mystery Week. We arrived at school to find Dr Who's TARDIS outside on our lawn and no-one could explain how it had got there! We were rather excited and wondered if we needed to keep an eye out for daleks or cybermen rampaging through Otley. Fortunately we were able to think up some great adventure stories and write some contingency plans about what we would need to do if we found ourselves in the middle of a Dr Who adventure. ( We are keeping a close and very cautious eye on that statue just outside the school lane.....those who have watched the Weeping Angels will know that we have to be always alert...)

Of course we are all looking forward to Christmas. Christmas at St Joseph's is great fun as we get out and about and sing at the Victorian Fayre, we raise money for charities by singing at Waitrose, we entertain the senior members of the Otley community at their Christmas party and Key Stage 1 has their very special Nativity play to perform. The excitement is beginning to be felt in the atmosphere around school!!

Here are the photographs of some of the things we got up to last Christmas! Let's look forward to this Christmas being just as much fun!

Otley Victorian Fayre:

As part of our dinosaur maths, we researched the actual size of a stegosaurus and measured out on the hall floor, the exact (probable! ) size one would/may have been! We then cut it out, painted it, hung it on the wall and called him “Steggie”.

We worked out that he was probably 64,999,992 years older than most of the people in year 3. We also worked out that he was longer than three Ford Focuses (Foci ?) and taller than our class room. He was big!! We used him in a lot of problem solving and now year 3 feel it’s always useful to have a dinosaur around the place!!

November is very special for us. We did a collective worship about Remembrance Sunday. We had to do a lot of research and go around all the war memorials in Otley. It was very shocking to realise just how many people from Otley had died in wars. We prayed especially for the latest person from Otley to be killed in action. This happened in Afghanistan 2 years ago.

We read the names on the war memorial at Our Lady and All Saints church and we recognised a lot of family names. We did as much research as we could and found out about the men who gave their lives so we could live in freedom. Then, in our worship we kept the promise made by our ancestors, we read out their names and prayed for them with respect and gratitude for the sacrifice they made. They were members of the St Joseph’s family will always be remembered

During the Christmas season we did lots and lots of things. We know it is our duty and privilege to take our skills to the people who live with and near us so we were thrilled to be invited to sing at two different parties for the elderly in Otley.

Then we had a fantastic time dressing up and singing at the Victorian Fayre. We also:

prepared music for our school carol concert,
sang carols at Otley Parish Church......we pleased to be the first people in 500 years to sing latin carols within the church.
recorded a CD for Otley Talking books,
sang at the end of term Mass,
made Christmas cards
enjoyed our school disco
got out the sewing machine which is over 100 years old and made ourselves party hats
loved our class party
had a brilliant Christmas lunch..............

Every one of us had a good time at the Christmas Lunch!

We like to use the latest technology at St Joseph's but just for a change we decide to get out the sewing machine that is over 100 years old and make ourselves party hats for the Christmas season! Paris, Milan, New York and Otley....centres of the fashion industry!

We are hoping Chanel will be in touch soon....or perhaps Vivienne Westwood!

Then just to make sure we had done everything we could think of …..we shared our favourite toys with each other during our last day of term.

As we mentioned earlier, year 3 is a very musical class. We play the recorder and we have recorded a CD for Otley Talking Books.Some of us play the violin, a few of us play the piano, some are guitarist and one of us is a trumpeter!So the next logical step was to extend our talents to..........drumming. We have been loaned some beautiful, full size djembe drums and each week this term Avtar comes in to teach us how to play. At first we were more enthusiastic than skillful but as time has gone on we are showing ourselves to be true musicians, able to conquer any instrument!