October was a busy month in 3rd and 4th class. We began the month immersing ourselves in a STEM project based on rivers. We studied the journey of a river, to discover it has three parts. It has an upper, middle and lower course. We learned all about the source, tributaries, and mouth of a river. We learned about the River Shannon in Ireland and the amazing Amazon River in South America. We even created our very own model of a river. We used sand, stones, tin foil, food colouring and water to create it. We placed sand and stones at the edges of a tray, and ran the tin foil in a meandering way through it. We diluted water with blue food colouring in a jug and poured into onto the tinfoil. However, we discovered this wasn’t an accurate model of a river as it wasn’t flowing. We came up with a plan to punch some holes with a pencil at the ‘mouth of the river’ and it did the trick. Our model river began to flow out into the sea, imitating a real river.
We then turned our focus to building a bridge to cross the river! We put our engineering hats on and worked in groups to design a bridge that would work. The aim was to ensure our bridge designs would hold a toy car for 30 seconds. We used a variety of materials to create our bridges, One team used building blocks, another used Lego, we had another group using cardboard and recycled materials, one using lollipop sticks and sellotape and we had an edible bridge made from ‘Pringles’. We used team effort, discussion, reason and problem solving to design and create our bridges. It was an exciting experience for us and allowed us to work as an engineer for a short while!
The history of Halloween came in a timely way for us and we discovered that Halloween dates right back to the time of The Celts. We focused on our scary Halloween stories first, where the children drafted, edited and redrafted their stories. We drew illustrations to go with them and we digitally added them to our typed version. The children really enjoyed using their imaginations and the writing process.
We rounded of the month with some very enjoyable Halloween pumpkin paintings and a haunted village craft scene!
Wishing everyone a safe and happy Halloween from all of us in 3rd and 4th class!