Welcome to Badger class! Our teacher is Miss Wood, who is now entering her second year at Bedwell. She brings lots of new ideas with her, and is really keen to make our lessons as active and engaging as possible.

• Our curriculum map - find out about our current topics
• Our latest school newsletter
• Meet our school councilors, Joe and Phoebe

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.  
• Our work on grouping animals relies on us having lots of science knowledge, so talk about creatures you see when you’re out and about - what do they eat? Where do they live? What other living things are they similar to? Don’t worry if this involves some ‘let’s Google that when we get home’ - realising that it’s OK not to know everything is a Learning Superhero skill!
• If you’re looking for an afternoon out, many of our local museums have Anglo-Saxon finds and relics amongst their collections - including Stevenage, Hertford and Ware Museums (all of which are free to enter). Check their websites for more details on visiting.
  
•  There are more resources to support the teaching of this topic on the BBC Bitesize history site at: www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zxsbcdm
  
• You can have a go at coding in Scratch by heading to scratch.mit.edu or downloading the Scratch app. There are loads and loads of tutorials, ideas and examples of other people’s work available on the Scratch site. 
  

Our latest news:

• Our Year 3/4 sports teams have done really well this term, with gold medals for both our Girls and Boys Indoor Athletics teams and a silver for our Rapid Fire Cricket team (pictured below). Over 25 of us have also played football for school this term, including 15 of us who took part in the Stevenage Schools Year 3/4 Girls Football Festival.
 

  
• We thoroughly enjoyed getting involved in this year’s Science Week. A particular highlight was our session with the visiting planetarium, where we learnt about the solar system, stars and planets in a huge inflatable dome. We also had great fun completing this year’s Knex challenge, where we had to build a protective helmet, and our annual Egg Drop competition, where we worked in pairs to build a contraption capable of safely transporting an egg from the classroom roof to the ground below.
  
 

 
• This term we visited Milton Keynes theatre to watch Horrible Histories: Awful Egyptians. As well as being educational, the show also brought everything to life. We watched a body be mummified, learnt about the life of Rameses II, found out why the Gods were so important, and much more.
 

  
• To celebrate World Book Day, we got into costume, dressing-up as our favourite storybook characters. We were really impressed with the range of characters and stories on show, with everything from the Wizard of Oz to David Walliams to Star Wars!
 

We have been learning about... 

History - Our topic this term has been the Ancient Egyptians, and we have loved learning about their world - especially the messy facts about how they made their mummies! We have also explored their Gods, clothes, food and lifestyle, and have begun to investigate the way that they used hieroglyphics.

English - This half term, we have been diving into the magical world of Leon and the Place Between! We have been working incredibly hard to write our own narrative stories inspired by this illustrated book, focusing on using fronted adverbials, adverbs and adjectives to add detail and excitement. 

Art - In Art we have been exploring colour patterns inspired by Wassily Kandinsky, developing our colour mixing skills and our knowledge of colours that complement and contrast. Recently we have been creating prints based on the work of William Morris, exploring the use of patterns and block colours.  

This term's topics

English - We will begin the term by exploring persuasive letters and speeches, using the fantastic Malala’s Magic Pencil as our core text. We will investigate the use of conjunctions, adverbs and prepositions to link texts together, and identify differences between spoken and written arguments. We will complete the unit by writing persuasive letters of our own. Later in the term, we will switch our focus to non-chronological reports. We will learn to use commas, pronouns and the present perfect tense to make our writing clear, as well as exploring the use of organisational devices like subheadings and glossaries. All this will support us in writing our own reports on the subject of play. 

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 developing our understanding of position, direction and co-ordinates, plotting and translating shapes and beginning to identify acute and obtuse angles within them. 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 investigating the way that living things can be grouped –in particular by what they eat, by where they live and by their family (fish, reptiles, mammals etc.) We will use classification keys to sort and identify living things in the world around us and food chains to show how predators and prey are linked. We will also be thinking about the effect that humans have on our environment.

Humanities - Our focus for the next term will be the Anglo- Saxons. We will begin by placing them on a timeline, relating them to other periods and civilisations that we have already learnt about, before investigating their origins, including where they came from and why they invaded Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries. We will identify the areas where they settled and discover the effect that they had on the lands that they moved to, particularly spreading Christianity and the first creation of an English nation. Finally we will discover what life was like for these warrior farmers, including investigating how they lived, what they ate and what it was like for young Anglo-Saxon children.

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