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, Monika and Roman

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
• Sort things in the home into solids, liquids and gases. Some are easy (bricks are definitely solid) but some, like sugar or sand, will need a bit more thought. Why are these solids? If you can find something you can’t sort, bring it into class! There are resources to support our science topic available on BBC Bitesize at: www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zgwc96f 
• 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 - Our next English topic will see us exploring explanation texts, using The Bedtime Book of Impossible Questions as our core text. We will explore the use of headings, sub-headings and paragraphs to organise information, as well as experimenting with a range of fronted adverbials and conjunctions to link ideas together. We will then pull together all of these ingredients to write our own explanations, coming up with answers to our own Impossible Questions. After that, we’ll move back to story writing, developing our use of speech in stories. Throughout the term we will continue to develop our spelling knowledge, adding a range of different suffixes and prefixes to root words. 

Maths - Our big focus for the next few weeks will be on developing our understanding of multiplication and division. We will begin by revising our knowledge of times tables facts and developing our ability to count in multiples - first in steps of 2, 3, 5 and 10, and then (for those of us who are more confident), in 6s, 7s and 9s. We will use arrays and regrouping to solve multiplication problems, and develop our understanding of the link between multiplication and division to help find unknown facts. We will also use our place value knowledge to enable us to multiply and divide by 10 and 100. Across all of these topics, we will be doing lots of problem solving to help us apply our knowledge to a range of situations.

Science - We will be exploring ‘states of matter’, working out what the difference is between solids, liquids and gases and comparing the way that materials move and behave in each state. We will do lots of sorting and grouping, and will carry out experiments to see how we can change materials from one state to another through heating and cooling.

Humanities - We will continue to investigate volcanoes, tsunamis, earthquakes and other natural disasters. We will be looking at the impact these disasters have had on environments around the world, and exploring the ways in which people who live in areas where earthquakes and tsunamis are common, protect themselves against these events. We will also begin to investigate the reasons why these disasters happen - and to do that, we will need to find out more about the way the Earth is structured and the forces that move chunks of it around.

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