Welcome to Mole class! Our teacher is Miss Smith, who has been at Bedwell ever since she started teaching, five years ago. She is very good at PE and English, and she says her favourite things are reading and dogs. Miss Smith doesn’t like beetroot very much, and is scared of spiders!

• All about Year 3 and 4 - our class presentation
• Our curriculum map - find out about our current topics
• Our latest class newsletter
• Meet our school councilors, Chloe, Lucas and Mason 

Home learning ideas:

• We have started using Google Classroom in class, so we will be familiar with it as a platform for learning beyond school. Login details have been sent out to all parents.
• In history this term we are learning about the Anglo-Saxons, which provides lots of opportunities for learning beyond the classroom - try investigating the history, and making a poster, picture or model of what it looked like to live in an Anglo-Saxon village. There's lots of information, video and links to get you started available on the BBC Bitesize webiste, here.
• In English, our next text is Christmas at Camelot. You can find the first chapter of the story here, following Jack and Annie on their latest adventure. Suggested activities can be found on the last two pages.  
• We are regularly set maths tasks and challenges via Mathletics, and should all know how to log in - let your teacher know if you can't get on. We've also started using Times Table Rock Stars to support us in learning our tables facts.
• 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.  
• There are also exercises for practicing and learning tricky red and orange words here.  
• In science, we are exploring the human body, focussing in particular on teeth and digestion. There are loads of resources and ideas to support these topics available through the Oak National Academy, here.      
• Make sure you keep fit at home with a bt of Cosmic Kids Yoga or a Joe Wix workout!    

Our latest news:

• We started the term with a DT project that saw us learning about levers and linkages, which we then combined to build some fantastic moving puppets. 
 
• In science this term, we have been learning about the human body. We have revised the features that all living things share (there are seven - see if you can remember them all), and then explored the role of the human skeleton. We built models to help us understand how muscles work, and next we'll be learning about how the digestive system works.
 

 
• School Council elections - One of our first tasks this term was to elect our new School Councillors. We thought carefully about the skills we thought a good class representative should have, what we liked about our school and how it could be improved further. Building on this, we then drew on all our understanding to write speeches, ’selling’ ourselves to the rest of our class and showing why we’d be the perfect Councillor. It was a tough choice, with loads of us making fantastic speeches, but once voting was complete and all the ballots had been counted, we elected Chloe and Mason. You can read their speeches here.     
 
• As part of our Hinduism topic in RE, we got the opportunity to visit the biggest Hindu temple outside of India, the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir. This was an amazing experience, and we were awestruck by the beautifully built temple. We enjoyed learning about how it was built and were amazed at the effort and detail put into it. We were also lucky enough to watch midday prayers and to witness Hindu beliefs in action, whilst respectively observing the ceremonies and listening to the chants.
 

We have been learning about... 

English - We focused this term on fiction writing, and in particular on the way authors use speech to introduce characters and move stores forward. We used a scene from Mary Poppins as our model text, and began the term by exploring this thoroughly, including our Practically Perfect Tea Party! This also got us thinking about other classic children’s stories from a similar era, and we have looked at The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in our reading sessions.

Music - Learning to play glockenspiels and recorders has been a new skill that we have been developing. Not only are we learning how to play these instruments, but we are also being taught the basics of reading music. This has included learning new terminology, such as the names of the notes and the length of beat they represent.

This term's topics

English - We will be using our powers of persuasion this half term! Our focus will involve us thinking about our planet and specifically our oceans. We will be looking at the impact of plastic in our oceans and how it affects the wildlife. Then, we will use the features of persuasive writing such as: emotive language, exaggeration and rhetorical questions to help put our point of view across.

Maths - In Mole class, we will be learning a range of mental strategies for addition and subtraction, and then developing the ability to choose the best strategy to use to solve a particular problem.

Science - We will be exploring the range of living things that exist in the world around us, and the ways in which they can be grouped. We will learn to construct food chains and use these to help us to understand the impact that small changes can have on an entire ecosystem. Linking in with our English topic, we will finish by considering the impact that humans can have on the environment.

Humanities - Over the next half-term we will be looking at the Anglo Saxons. We will look at their origins, including where they came from and why they invaded. We will identify the areas of settlement and what affect they have had on our culture. Finally, we will discover what life was like for these warrior farmers, including how they lived, what they ate and what daily life was like.

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