Welcome to Fieldmouse class! Our teacher is Mrs Devenish, who has been teaching at Bedwell for 15 years and loves making our lessons as creative as possible. Her favourite things are cooking and being outdoors, although she doesn’t like snow very much, and is scared of spiders.

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

Home learning ideas:

• Try to do as much maths as you can when you're out and about:
  • Keep on practicing counting whenever and wherever you can - how many cars are there in the street? How many trees in the field? How many trollies in the supermarket, players on the team or stairs on the way to bed? Our focus is on numbers from 10-20 this term, so things that come in groups of this size are ideal for counting practice.
  • Practice writing numbers in sand, salt or water, or try making numbers out of groups of pebbles.
  • Practice counting in 2s, 5s and 10s - counting in multiples as you go up or down stairs; counting in 2s as you pair up socks; totalling up everyone’s fingers and toes by counting in 5s...
• Constant practice of reading and phonics is just about the most valuable thing you can do at home. Try to read with your child as often as possible and talk to them about what they’ve read - we've put together some guidance and advice on using the books your child will bring home here.  
• We follow the Read Write Inc phonics programme, and they have provided lots of guidance on supporting your child at home, which you can read here.
• Practice identifying key places on maps - a globe or a big map of the world would be great, but if you haven’t got one of those, Google Maps on a tablet or laptop is just as good (and means you can start to zoom in on some of the places we’ve talked about).
  
• Try planting seeds in the garden or a window box and talking about what happens to them. What do we need to do to help them grow? How do plants change as they grow?

Our latest news:

• To finish off our topic we went to visit Shuttleworth. We had a fantastic day and loved the different activities we completed. We learnt about mono-planes, bi-planes and tri-planes, found out why aircraft are painted different colours to keep them camouflaged and tried on some of hats that pilots wore. We also had the opportunity to have a ride on a vintage bus and watch planes taking off, flying and landing.
 

 
• We loved dressing-up for World Book Day, and took part in lots of activities linked to reading and some of our favourite characters.
 

 
• We have enjoyed attending Forest School. We have had great fun exploring the forest, engaging in different activities and making our own snack. We particularly liked making log dogs, making magical wands, drinking hot chocolate and playing games at the end of each session.
 

 
• We had a fantastic visit to see Peter Pan in Milton Keynes. It was a great opportunity for us to watch a real production after completing our own show (you can find out more about how that went here), and we quickly knew when we needed to laugh, clap or boo!

We have been learning about... 

English - This term’s texts have been Stanley’s Stick, Ruby’s Worry and Madlenka. We have concentrated on writing complete sentences, as well as learning to use exclamation marks and question marks.

History - This term our topic has been Up, Up and Away! We have been learning about flight and how it has changed throughout the years from gliders to the planes of today. 

Art  - We have looked at a variety of Indian art, including Madhabani and Rangoli patterns and spent lots of time trying to recreate our own pieces in this style.

This term's topics

English - We will start the term by focussing on letter writing, using Paddington’s Post as our core text. We will investigate the way that letters are organised and develop our understanding of where capital letters should be used in our writing. We will then be writing letters to children in Hedgehog Class to find out more about life in Year 2. After that, we will be returning to story writing, using the story of Little Red and The Very Hungry Lion to explore traditional tales. We will then write our own versions of the story.

Maths - We will begin the term by exploring measurement, measuring heights, lengths and weights using a mixture of standard (metres, cm, kg) and non-standard (hands, books, marbles etc.) units. We will then move on to develop our understanding of multiplication and division, using equal groups, repeated addition, sharing, simple pictures, counting sticks and arrays to solve problems. We will introduce the idea of ‘remainders’ when dividing, and think about what to do with these ‘left over’ bits when we solve problems. We will also develop our ability to count in 2s, 5s and 10s, which will help to speed-up our working, and eventually lead to recall of our 2x, 5x and 10x tables.

Science - We will be investigating and naming a variety of wild and garden plants and flowers. We will be planting seeds, exploring the way that different plants grow and thinking about the things that they need to stay healthy. As we make observations, we will also learn to name different parts of flowering plants, using words like leaf, root, petal and stem.

Humanities - We will be getting to grips with maps of the world this term, looking at lots of different maps (as well as globes and atlases), and locating key places. In particular, we will learn to quickly identify the five oceans and seven continents that cover our planet, as well as where we live and parts of the world where we have family connections. Once we have got to grips with maps, we will begin to put ourselves in the position of the captain of a ship, giving directions and trying to work out how to navigate the high seas! We will explore the use of compasses and compass directions (North, South, East and West), and will imagine some of the difficulties that might face us on our long ocean journeys!

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