Welcome to Moles class! Our teacher is Mr Humber, who has been teaching for fifteen years, the last six of which have been at Bedwell. He is really good at art, history and maths, and he says his favourite things are rugby and pizza!

• Our curriculum map - find out about our current topics
• Our latest class newsletter
• Meet our school councilors, Poppy and Jaden

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.  
• Investigate what magnets stick to - fridge magnets work fine, and you can investigate lots of different materials around the house. Try different metals and help your child discover that magnets only stick to some of them (mostly iron and steel). There are lessons to support our science topic available on the Oak Academy site.
  
• In geography we're learning about water. We’re disappointingly short on big rivers in our part of Hertfordshire, so if the opportunity arrives for a visit to an interesting lake or riverside (on the way back from a day out or just for a Sunday afternoon walk), that’d be great - we’d love to hear about it (and share some photos) in class.    
• In art, we're exploring the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. This only starts to make sense once you’ve seen it, so start at www.giuseppe-arcimboldo.org. We’re then going to use his work to inspire our own collages, using a variety of textiles. To have a go at something similar at home, try starting at the Tate Kids or artfulparent.com sites. 
• Keeping fit, happy and healthy is always important. There are links to lots of great resources and workouts to help everyone in the family get active at www.sportengland.org/jointhemovement

Our latest news:

• We can’t quite believe a whole term has passed here in Year 4 - and what a term it has been! We have been busy with so many lessons and projects, getting to know each other, playing sports and visiting the cinema; you name it, we’ve done it. This term’s highlights have been art and DT, where we have been creating Kandinsky style paintings and hand-sewing superhero puppets.
 

  
• Back on transition day in July we drew ourselves as learning super heroes and, continuing that theme, this term we have designed and made our very own puppets. We learnt a running stitch and blanket stitch, using a mixture of the two on our final piece. We had enormous fun, but getting the thread through the needles was by the far the trickiest part. Check out some of our handy work below.
  
 

 
• We rounded-off the term with a fantastic Christmas party, full of games, dancing and food!
 

We have been learning about... 

English - We have been focussing on persusaive writing. We explored the use of technieques including exaggeration, rhetorical questions, emotive langauge and personal pronouns to engage the reader and get our point across. We were then asked to think about things we would like to change around school, and then produce a persuasive piece of writing to kick-start our campaign.     

Geography - In our geography lessons we have been exploring a range of natural disasters. We investigated the effect that they can have on local communities, the reasons why they occur and some of the things that people are doing to try to limit their effects.

This term's topics

English - Our next fiction topic focuses on Science Fiction stories, so expect our writing to be full of aliens, robots, space ships and time travellers! We will be exploring different ways that feelings are shown in writing, including through description, speech and the use of emotive language. Our stories will have time ‘jumps’ in them, so we will also be working on the use of different tense forms to show if things are happening in the present, the past or will happen in the future. Finally, we will be fine-tuning our use of punctuation, especially speech marks and commas. In our reading lessons, meanwhile, we will be developing our predicting, summarising and detective skills, looking for those key clues that show us how characters feel and what they are likely to do next. 

Maths - Our main focus at the start of term will be on multiplication and division strategies. We will learn to use formal written strategies to multiply and divide 3-digit numbers by 1-digit numbers (solving calculations like 216 x 3 or 342 ÷ 6). We will then use these strategies to solve a variety of problems. Later in the term we will be returning to the topic of time, learning to read, write and calculate times using both analogue and digital clocks. We will also learn to convert between 12-hour and 24-hour clocks. Throughout the term, we will also continue to practice and learn our tables facts, aiming to recall all our facts up to 12 x 12 in preparation for our tables check in June.

Science - We will be exploring different types of forces, including pushes, pulls, gravity and friction, and thinking about the way that these affect the way that objects move in different situations. We will design and carry out fair tests to see which materials create the most friction, and to discover which materials stick to magnets. We will also investigate different ways in which we can measure forces.

Humanities - Water is all around us and vital to every type of life, and in this topic we will be learning about the way that the Water Cycle means that it is constantly being reused and recycled. We will locate the world’s major oceans, seas and rivers on a variety of maps, and discuss the difference between fresh water and sea water (and why it matters). We will also investigate the impact of water on environments, both shaping landscapes and effecting the growth of many towns and cities.

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