Welcome to Badger class! Our teacher is Miss Wood, who has joined our school this year. 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 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:

• Earlier in the term, Years 3 and 4 came together to organise a Stay and Make session for our parents and carers. We got together to design and make family shields, linked to our work on the story of Gwain and the Green Knight. We loved the chance to get creative together, and it was fantastic to see how many adults came into school to join in with our learning!
 

  
• We loved getting involved in this year’s Sports Week. We took part in yoga, trampolining, and skateboarding sessions, participated in lots of competitions and loved being involved in our fantastic KS2 Sports Day.
  
 

 
• On 7th June we journeyed to the Natural History Museum in Tring. We spent the day exploring the displays of animals and trying to locate specific species and animals from a checklist we were given. Just before lunch we took part in a workshop on teeth where we got to handle a narwhal tusk, a monkey skull, an elephant tooth and many more. We found out how to identify an animal’s diet from its teeth - something we turned out to be really good at!
 

 
• 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 - In Badger class, our final unit of the year has been pirate explanations. We have looked in great detail of the features of explanations with a focus on conjunctions and giving reasons to explain.

Computing - We have learnt to code this term, getting to grips with the Scratch platform and using it to tell stories and create simple games. It has been really challenging (you have to get the code exactly right to make it work), but we’ve been really impressed by what we’ve made!

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.