Welcome to Badger class! Our teacher is Mr Jones, who has joined our school this September, after 10 years working at other schools in Stevenage. He really enjoys sport and English, and is keen to make sure that our lessons are fun, inclusive and inspirational!    

• Our curriculum map - find out about our current topics
• Our latest school newsletter
• Meet our school councilors, Lacey and Daniel

Home learning ideas:

• As always, tables facts will be really important to us this term, so it would be brilliant if you could work on learning these at home. Focus on one table at a time and try:
  • Making-up rhymes to help remember number facts (“4 x 6 is 24, bears growl and lions roar!”) 
  • Looking for numbers in that table in the world around you - on doors, car number plates, in phone numbers or when you’re out shopping. 
  • Writing-out tables with finger paints, chalk or water-on-tarmac, or make them from playdoh. 
  • Chanting, singing, whispering... Say tables out loud together whenever you have the chance. 
• Each week we are set spellings to learn. Click here for guidance on strategies you can use to support your child in learning these at home.  
• Talk about the food you eat and the effect that it has on your bodies. Have a look at the nutritional information on the side of food packets and find foods that are high in fibre, protein or carbohydrates.
• Catch-up on some of the fab nature documentaries available on the BBC iplayer, looking at the range of things that different animals eat. 
• If you’re up for a day out, there are lots of local Roman sites and museums to visit - Welwyn Roman Baths, St Albans Hypocaust, Verulamium Museum and the British Museum all have lots of artefacts and remains to help bring history to life. A good place to start is www.stalbansmuseums.org.uk.
  
• There’s some great advice on talking to children about online safety on the NSPCC website at www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/ We also use lots of resources from the UK Safer Internet Centre: saferinternet.org.uk/ 

Our latest news:

• On Thursday 5th June, Years 3 and 4 headed to the Natural History Museum in Tring on what turned out to be a very rainy day. After we got settled, we spent the morning exploring the many galleries and exhibits before heading into a workshop on animal classification (which has been our science topic this term). We broke into groups and were given five different skeletons to investigate and identify. We loved exploring the museum, and many of us couldn’t believe how big some of the animals are in real life!
 

 
• We’ve continued to pack in lots of parent and carer workshops throughout the term, sharing our learning, celebrating successes and giving ideas for supporting children at home. In Year 3/4 we ran a brilliant Stay & Make focussing on Anglo Saxon art, where each family created a brooch from clay and gemstones. An amazing 82 family members attended (sending staff off to round up every available table in the school), and it was great to see whole families working together to create pieces of art and sharing what they had made. Thank you to everyone who made it along.
 

 
• The whole school got involved in this year’s Sports Week, which took place from 16th - 20th June. Across a packed week, we took part in three Sports Days, a huge range of taster sessions and lots of fantastic events run by local clubs and sporting organisations, as well as our brilliant Sports Days. You can find out more about what we got up to here.    
 

 
• Our Year 3/4 sports teams have done really well this term, with gold medals for both our Girls and Boys Indoor Athletics teams and a silver for our Rapid Fire Cricket team (pictured below). Over 25 of us have also played football for school this term, including 15 of us who took part in the Stevenage Schools Year 3/4 Girls Football Festival.
 

  
• We thoroughly enjoyed getting involved in this year’s Science Week. A particular highlight was our session with the visiting planetarium, where we learnt about the solar system, stars and planets in a huge inflatable dome. We also had great fun completing this year’s Knex challenge, where we had to build a protective helmet, and our annual Egg Drop competition, where we worked in pairs to build a contraption capable of safely transporting an egg from the classroom roof to the ground below.
  
 

 
• We visited Milton Keynes theatre to watch Horrible Histories: Awful Egyptians. As well as being educational, the show also brought everything to life. We watched a body be mummified, learnt about the life of Rameses II, found out why the Gods were so important, and much more.
 

We have been learning about... 

History - Our topic this term has been the Ancient Egyptians, and we have loved learning about their world - especially the messy facts about how they made their mummies! We have also explored their Gods, clothes, food and lifestyle, and have begun to investigate the way that they used hieroglyphics.

English - This half term, we have been diving into the magical world of Leon and the Place Between! We have been working incredibly hard to write our own narrative stories inspired by this illustrated book, focusing on using fronted adverbials, adverbs and adjectives to add detail and excitement. 

Art - In Art we have been exploring colour patterns inspired by Wassily Kandinsky, developing our colour mixing skills and our knowledge of colours that complement and contrast. Recently we have been creating prints based on the work of William Morris, exploring the use of patterns and block colours.  

This term's topics

English - Our next English topic will see us exploring explanation texts, using Until I Met Dudley by Roger McGough as our core text. We will explore the use of headings, sub-headings and paragraphs to organise information, as well as experimenting with a range of fronted adverbials and conjunctions to link ideas together. After that, we’ll move back to story writing, with our writing built around two brilliant texts - Starbird by Sharon King-Chai and Zeraffa Giraffa by Dianne Hofmeyr. This will give us lots of opportunities to develop our use of speech in stories, learning how to punctuate it correctly. Throughout the term we will also continue to develop our spelling knowledge, adding a range of different suffixes and prefixes to root words.

Maths - Our big focus for the next few weeks will be on developing our understanding of multiplication and division. We will begin by revising our knowledge of times tables facts and developing our ability to count in multiples - first in steps of 2, 3, 5 and 10, and then (for those of us who are more confident), in 6s, 7s and 9s. We will also use our place value knowledge to enable us to multiply and divide by 10 and 100. This will then lead into work on measures, using these skills to convert between centimetres and metres, grams and kilograms, millilitres and litres etc. Across all of these topics, we will be doing lots of problem solving to help us apply our knowledge to a range of situations.

Science - Our next science topic will see us focussing on healthy bodies, finding out what sort of foods our bodies need to stay healthy. We will be exploring the way that our muscles and skeletons work and comparing the diets of different animals. We will also be contrasting the bodies of animals with and without skeletons, investigating the way they move, eat and protect themselves.

Humanities - We will continue to explore what happened when the Romans invaded Britain and the way in which it changed life in our country. We will be looking at the reasons why the Romans were so powerful and some of the leaders who helped to grow their Empire. We will be making our own timelines and identifying what still remains of Roman Britain. Throughout the topic, we will be looking at a range of artefacts, ruins and historical sources to help us to think like an historian.

Take a look at our curriculum map for more information on our topics.