Forest School

This week, Year 3 started Forest School! Over the coming weeks, we will be learning many new skills linked to fire making, woodworking, cooking and more, whilst also thinking about sustainability. This week, as well as working as a team, we learnt how to safely create a spark to build up a fire. Afterwards, we played a game called 'What's my tree?' whereby a blindfolded person was led to a tree, had to feel/learn it, and later had to find it when the blindfold was taken off. 

We finished the session by taking it in turns to exstinguish the fire and saying one thing we were grateful for in the session. 

Plants: Stems

This week, we looked at the function of the stem/trunk in a plant. As well as holding the plant/tree upright, we are told that it also carries water around the plant through small tubes. To see if this is true, we put dye into water to see if it would be carried around the plant via the stem. Here are the results, proving that water is carried around the plant via the stem. 

Plants: Roots

Year 3 are learning about plants and this lesson focussed on the function of roots. We learnt that they anchor the plant into place, and root hairs absorb water and nutrients in the soil. We loved using the handheld microscopes to see these root hairs. 

What makes Brazil Distinctive? Rivers! 

To finish our learning on Brazil, we looked at how the rivers are used in Brazil as a means to create power for the country. Many hydroelectric dams have been built or are soon to be built to provide electricity for the people living in the country. Brazil imports more energy than it exports, so dams are a good way to create their own energy. However, dams are not very good for the environment in that it can cause flooding and stop marine life from reaching their usual breeding spots. We recreated a dam to show what could happen in heavy rainfalls when water is not flowing through the dam. It flooded!