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 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 will be coming home soon.      
• 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.
• 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 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.      

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 focussing on report writing. We really enjoyed our work around Mary Poppins last half-term, so we will be building on this them and exploring reports about chimney sweeps, nannies and bankers. We will look at the features found in reports and explore them through lots of reading activities. To make our reports really impressive, we will continue to develop our knowledge of sentence structure, using relative clauses and subordinating conjunctions to add detail and explanation.

Maths - We will be developing our fractions knowledge. We will begin by securing our understanding of the concept of fractions and the language linked to them, and will then move on to learn how to add and subtract fractions and find fractions of amounts. Later in the term, we will be returning to our strategies for multiplication and division, developing a range of mental and written approaches and then applying them to problem solving situations.

Science - We will be exploring the life of plants, including identifying and describing the functions of different parts of flowering plants and investigating the requirements of plants for life and growth. We will investigate how water is transported through plants, and will also study specific plants to find out which properties vary from plant to plant.

Humanities - In History, we will continue to learn all about Roman Britain next half-term. We will be exploring what happened when the Romans invaded, discovering why they initially failed and how they ultimately succeeded. We will be looking at the different challenges the Romans faced, including the resistance led by Boudicca and the threats that led to the construction of Hadrian’s Wall. Finally, we will discover why the Romans left and discuss their legacy.

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