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 class 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.
• In history, we are looking at the history of flight, so it would be great if you could share memories of any flights you have been on in the past. What were the planes like? Where did you go? What was the journey like? If older family members have memories of what flights were like 40 or 50 years ago, that’d really help!
  
• Visit the air museums at Shuttleworth, Duxford or Hendon to see first-hand how planes have changed over the last 100 years.
• It’s Safer Internet Day on February 11th, so this is a good opportunity for us all to talk about the way that we stay safe online. This year’s focus is on avoiding online scams - you can find our more at saferinternet.org.uk/

Our latest news:

• We had a fantastic visit to see Peter Pan in Milton Keynes on the 10th December. 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 rounded-off the term with a brilliant Christmas Party - a big thank you to everyone who sent in food!
 

 
• This term it has been our turn to attend Forest School every Friday. 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 learnt all about seaside environments in the summer term - so the only sensible choice for our end-of-year trip was a huge outing to the beach! Having chosen Clacton-on-Sea as our destination, we enjoyed a fabulous day at the seaside with incredible weather and lots of happy smiling faces. We built sandcastles, searched for shells and buried each other in the sand before devouring our packed lunches. In the afternoon, some of us continued building in the sand, while others got out the frisbees and beach balls for some fun games. A few of us were even brave enough to dip our toes in the sea, but as it was not very warm (and to keep everyone safe) we decided not to let the water go above our ankles. We finished off with ice cream and lollies on the seafront, before heading back to the coach. You could tell how busy our day had been by the number of us who quickly fell asleep on the way home!  
 

We have been learning about... 

History - This half term our topic has been Changing Stevenage. We have been learning about how Stevenage has changed over the years and finding places on a map. We have also looked at old and new toys and talked about how they have changed.

English - This term we have focussed on Traditional Stories. We have looked at a variety of different stories and the characters within them. We have acted out different adventures and practised writing simple sentences to retell stories, write letters and describe characters. On this page you can see us retelling the stories of The Princess and the Pea, The Three Billy Goats Gruff and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We then looked at a brilliant book called STOP! That’s not my story! and used the format to write about the story we would like to be in and the reasons for our choices.

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 - Our first unit of the term is based around the story Stanley's Stick, by John Hegley. We will write speech bubbles for characters in the story, and will then develop our ability to retell it in a variety of ways, including making mini-books to bring home. After that, we will create our own versions of the story, where we are the main characters! Following on from this, we will be shifting our focus to recounts, using the stories Ravi’s Roar and Ruby’s Worry (both by Tom Percival) to inspire our work. We will think about times in our lives when we had ‘roars’ or worries of our own and will retell these events in a series of sentences written in the past tense.

Maths - We will continue to cement our understanding of numbers greater than ten this term, working out how many tens and ones there are in each number and representing this in a variety of different ways. We will also be identifying which of these numbers are odd or even, and exploring doubling and halving. By using different methods, equipment and strategies, we will become more fluent in our number knowledge, and will then be able to use this to help us to reason about numbers and solve problems. Later in the term we will be moving on to explore the properties of 2d and 3d shapes, learning their correct mathematical names and spotting these shapes in the world around us.

Science - We will be learning about animals from around the world. We will be learning to classify them into groups, recognising the difference between fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. We will also identify the differences between herbivores, carnivores and omnivores, and finding out what foods our favourite animals like to eat.

Humanities - In history, we will be looking at the first flight, made by the Wright Brothers in 1903, and exploring the ways in which planes have changed since then, looking at shape, design and the different purposes planes have been used for. We will think about the way the world has been changed by the invention of powered flight (and especially by reliable, mass produced aircraft) and plot key dates on a timeline. Finally, we will link this topic to our work from last term on the way the world has changed since our grandparents were young.

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