Welcome to Moles class! Our teacher is Mr Jones, who joined our school last 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, Theo and Bonnie

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.  
• We’re exploring persuasive writing and persuasive speech, so keep an eye out for this (it’s everywhere!) Talk about the way that adverts try to sell us something or people on TV try to get us to agree with them or vote for them - the choice of words is usually really important!.
  
• We’re learning about volcanoes, earthquakes, floods and hurricanes, so if anyone in the family has first-hand experiences of these (that aren’t too scary), they would be great to share. Otherwise, see what you can find out about one of these natural disasters - the BBC Bitesize site has some great videos and animations here. 
• If you’re visiting London anytime soon, the Natural History Museum has a whole section devoted to volcanoes and earthquakes - you can find out more about visiting at www.nhm.ac.uk
• Explore sounds you can make around the house by tapping bottles, table tops or toys. What links are there between the material and the sound produced? Try making a cup and string telephone, and talk about how the sound is being transmitted - there are instructions at https://www.sciencekids.co.nz/projects/stringphone.html
• 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:

• We loved getting involved in this year's Sports Week, which included skateboarding, rugby, netball, athletics and our massive Sports Day. We threw ourselves into every session with great enthusiasm, and discovered lots of new passions!
 

 
• We organised a fantastic French Café, which saw the Infant Hall packed with families ordering pastries and drinks en français and putting all of the French we have learnt this year to good use. 
 

 
• At the start of June, Years 3 and 4 visited Celtic Harmony Camp in Hertford to support our history topic, which has focussed on life in Ancient Britain. We took part in a series of activities that helped us to understand what life was like in the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, building shelters, making bread, shaping tools, moulding pots and exploring the woodlands. We had a great day out and it really helped to bring the past to life! 
 

 
• On 27th February, we came to school in red, white and blue to celebrate USA Day and round-off this term’s geography topic. During the day we took part in three very different activities. First up, we were introduced to American Football, learning the names of key positions, practising a play and scoring a touchdown. For the second session, we made apple pies, slicing apples and rolling out pastry. Finally, we created American flags, choosing unusual tools to paint the stars and stripes. 
 

 
• We loved getting involved in this year’s Science Week. We particularly enjoyed the senses trail, trying to identify objects using just one of our senses. We also took part in the Knex Challenge, building model helicopters in pairs. During the week we also got to take part in a session with Teaching Talons, who introduced us to some of their amazing animals and built egg-drop contraptions which could safely carry an egg from the roof to the ground. 
 

 

We have been learning about... 

Science - As part of our work on plants we carried out investigations to discover what they need to survive. We tried growing them in the dark, with no water or sealed in plastic bags (to give them no air). We recorded our observations carefully and used these to draw conclusions about the conditions needed for seeds to germinate and grow.

English - In English we have been reading a fantastic book called Leon and the Place Between. In the story, Leon wants to prove to his brothers that magic is real, so he volunteers to be in a magic show - and is transported to a mysterious, fantastical world. We used the same idea for our writing, with characters transported a new and exciting world after travelling through a strange portal. While writing, we focused on descriptive language and building suspense, as you can see in the examples below:

Lala was slowly walking around the peaceful woods. The woods were Lala’s favourite place to be. Lala said to herself, “Where should I go to now?” She went round the corner and found a surprise. A beautiful campfire was there! She saw tall, green and rough trees all around her. She also saw her friend running towards her. Suddenly, the tall, green, rough trees got even taller! Accidentally she tripped over and it really hurt. Before she could even catch her breath she was teleported to a magical world. “Where am I?” she asked herself...

By Frankie

“What game should I play?” asked Emily. She chose to play 99 Nights in the Forest and was making a good base to survive for 99 days, but then she got hungry and went to find food. Suddenly, she got teleported into her game because she played a bit too much. “Oh no, what am I going to do?” said Emily in shock. She thought she was stuck in the game forever, but there had to be a way out. “I can do this!” said Emily, feeling very brave...

By Stefi

This term's topics

English - We are starting the year by exploring the story of Mini-Rabbit Must Help, which we will use to revise sentence structure and develop our descriptive writing through precise adjective choices and expanded noun phrases. After that, we will move on to work on writing and presenting persuasive speeches, using The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs, by Jon Scieszka as our core text. We will extend our use of conjunctions to link and extend ideas and precise noun choices to make our ideas specific. We will also explore the way authors use rhetorical questions and alliteration to ‘sell’ ideas. We will then draw all these skills together to write our own persuasive speeches and present them to the rest of the class. 

Maths - All three maths group will be starting the year by focussing on place value, developing our understanding of whole numbers to 10,000. We will learn to partition these numbers into thousands, hundreds, tens and ones, and regroup them in lots of different ways. We will practice comparing, ordering and rounding, as well as finding 1000 more or less than a given number. After that, we will move on to addition and subtraction. We will start with mental strategies, using our partitioning and regrouping skills to quickly find totals, before moving on to revise our understanding of written ‘column’ strategies. Throughout the term, we will also be practicing our recall of key times table facts.

Science - We will be exploring the way sounds are made and the way in which they travel. We will examine the vibrations created by a range of different instruments and think about the way that the pitch and volume can be changed on specific devices. We will carry out fair tests to check our predictions, and then investigate which materials to use to make ear defenders.

Humanities - For our Natural Disasters topic, we will be investigating volcanoes and earthquakes and mapping the places where they are common. We will be looking at the impact that these disasters have had on people around the world, as well as investigating why they occur in the first place. We will then explore other types of natural events, such as hurricanes, flooding and tornadoes, and find out how people who live in areas where these are common protect themselves against these disasters.

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