Welcome to Badger class! Our teacher is Mrs Thomas, who has spent her whole teaching career working at Bedwell. She is really good at PE (especially football), and is keen to make sure that everyone in school is as active as possible.

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

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.
• 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. 
• 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 were incredibly enthusiastic about our Egyptian Day, which pulled together everything we have learnt about this ancient civilisation this term. There were six stations to explore, covering soap carving, hieroglyphics, food tasting, pyramid building and jewellery. We really enjoyed our day, and getting to share lots of what we had done with parents and carers at the end of the afternoon was a real treat as well. 
 

  
• In art we painted ourselves as pharaohs. After a quick snap of our faces we used oil pastels to add bright and elaborate Egyptian head pieces.
  
 

 
• We thoroughly enjoyed getting involved in this year's Science Week, which included a Teaching Talons animal workshop, lots of science challenges and our annual Egg Drop competition.
 

 
• In class we have been reading The Demon Dentist by David Walliams, getting ready for our trip to Milton Keynes Theatre. As soon as the curtain went up, we joined Alfie and Gabs on their adventure, investigating the strange events happening in their home town! We loved the production, and were in fits of laughter on several occasions!

We have been learning about... 

English - Over the last 6 weeks we have become reporters. After learning what makes a good newspaper report and finding out about adverbial openers, writing in the past tense and using quotes, we opened up our very own Newsroom. We reported on some very strange incidents that had occurred around our town, the funniest being a dragon landing at Fairland’s Lakes and a squirrel scoring a goal for Stevenage Borough! We then started writing newspaper reports about the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, linked to our work on Ancient Egypt.

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 - This half-term we will be investigating explanation texts. We will discuss the purpose of explanations (showing how or why something works) and identify their key features. We will look at lots of different explanations, comparing the way they are organised and using them to extend our knowledge of technical vocabulary. We will then hone-in on a model text, How Pirates Really Work, and use this to inspire our own writing. We will be working hard to develop our use of causal conjunctions (like so, therefore and because) and adverbials of time to link ideas together, and to use present tense correctly in our independent writing. Throughout the term we will continue to practice our spelling, working on adding the prefix ir– and the suffix –ion to root words.

Maths - We will be developing our understanding of division, moving from practical methods for sharing things out to visual strategies (using drawings) and then simple written methods. This will also tie-in with our continued work on developing our times table knowledge, as Year 4 get ready for their Multiplication Tables Check in June. After that, we will be returning to fractions, securing our understanding of unit fractions (which all have a ‘1’ on top) and extending into non-unit fractions (all the other fractions that don’t have a ‘1’ on top). We will find fractions of shapes and simple amounts, and will begin to recognise equivalent fractions (groups of fractions that have the same value, like 1/2, 2/4 and 3/6).

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 - We will continue to develop our understanding of life in Anglo-Saxon Britain. We will be learning more about the areas where the first Anglo-Saxons settled and investigating their culture, food, homes and beliefs. We will explore the impact their arrival had, spreading Christianity and the creating the first English nation. Throughout the topic, we will be using images of ancient artefacts (from coins and small fragments of pottery to huge sites like Sutton Hoo) to support our learning and to help us develop the ability to think like a historian.

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