Last week our Year 3s stepped back in time…to Ancient Greece! Not only did our girls look fabulous in their Ancient Greek clothing, which they had recently researched and expertly wore, but they were busy making wreaths, creating their own mosaics and using clay to make charm bracelets. They rounded off the day designing tiles and carving soap bars.

The following day saw competitive teamwork to the fore with our Year 3 House Olympics. Girls competed for their Houses as Athenians, Spartans, Corinthians & Argives (residents of Argos) in various competitions including running backwards and javelin. The highlight was when our junior Olympians took on ancient Greek wrestling using balloons (no olive oil in sight!), where our athletes had to wrestle and pop their balloons within 20 seconds to win a point for their team! Watch them in action here. At the end, the scores were very close, so close in fact that Seacole and Fry had tied for first, so each team chose an athlete to represent them in the wrestle-off playoff!

What a fabulous way to end our wonderful Ancient Splendours topic! 

We had previously been learning about The Battle of Marathon, as part of their preparation for the House Olympics with the “armies” of 3F and 3W acting out this famous battle, demonstrating the strategy that helped the Greeks to defeat the invading Persians, despite the odds being stacked against them. Earlier in March, we immersed ourselves in Greek architecture, learning about Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns and used Google Earth on our chrome books to travel to Greece to look at the Parthenon, before coming back to England to explore the columns at the Bank of England and the British Museum. We then had a sketching masterclass, and drew the three different types of columns. 

In the first half of term we had focused on Ancient Egypt, but before moving onto Ancient Greece we spent time looking at events that were happening concurrently in the two countries and how their histories are linked, including working out how to read and order events with dates that are marked as BC/AD or BCE/CE on a timeline.

In February, Year 3 were thrilled to spend an hour on a Zoom call with Emma Carroll, the author of their class text, Secrets of A Sun King, this week. Emma showed them around her writing room, spoke to the girls about the process of researching and writing her books and introduced them to her dogs who keep her company when she is writing. She answered questions that the girls asked her, which included discovering who her favourite character in the novel was and what jobs she had before she was an author. Emma even read them a few pages of the chapter that they are up to in Secrets of a Sun King, which was a real treat! 

For our IC trip, we visited the British Museum. Not only did we see a range of artefacts in the Egyptian galleries, including mummies, canopic jars and the Book of the Dead, but we also took part in a brilliant digital art workshop. The girls created their own artwork using a green screen and tablets, inspired by the scribe of Nebamun’s tomb.

Inspired by their recent school trip to @BritishMuseum, the Year 3s then made their very own canopic jars made from recycled materials and papier mâché in the senior school art studios.  Every pupil had to choose which head to put on their creations, with the jackal Duamutef proving the most popular one by far with the class. Getting Duamutef’s ears and nose to stick on was tricky but everyone did a great job!

For our Super Start to our topic, we learned about the formation of the country under the rule of Pharaoh Narmer. Based on their research and interpretation of historical artefacts and archaeological evidence, the girls created Narmer Crowns, demonstrating the unification of Lower and Upper Egypt, and etched hieroglyphics onto their clay Narmer Palettes.