Welcome to Badger class! Our teacher is Miss Bowden, who has joined our school this September. 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, Lacey and Daniel

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 will be exploring persuasion this term, so keep an eye out for examples of this genre in the world around you, like adverts on YouTube or in magazines, or speeches being made by politicians on TV. How effective are they? What makes them persuasive?
• 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
• Explore sounds you can make around the house by tapping bottles, table tops or toys. What links are there between the material and the sound produced? Try making a cup and string telephone, and talk about how the sound is being transmitted - there are instructions at https://www.sciencekids.co.nz/projects/stringphone.html
• 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 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.
 

 
• 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! 
 

 
• 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! 
 

 
• 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.  
 

 
•  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.
 

 
• In history, we have learnt about the Romans and how they shaped Britain. To accompany our history learning, we have looked at a vast range of Roman mosaics, studied how they have been created and then designed and created our own mosaics. We explored the story of Boudicca and what challenges she faced. We spent three lessons studying, designing and creating our own Roman shields, which you can see below. 
 

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 - We have all been really trying hard to develop our writing this term, focussing on adding fronted adverbials (with a comma), using expanded noun phrases and similes when describing characters and settings, and ensuring that speech is accurately punctuated. Along with making sure our handwriting is the best it can be and all our spelling is tip-top, it’s a lot to remember all at once, but we have been working hard to draw all of these skills together and produce finished writing that we can be proud of. Over the last few weeks we have been working on writing stories inspired by the fantastic book Leon and the Place Between - and you can read a few extracts from our finished pieces below:

In a dark, cold, beautiful room, a little girl called Maren lived in a peaceful, warm house. She was the only child and her father had surprisingly passed away due to cancer. This all happened when she was five years old, and it made her very depressed. Six years later, when she was at her window, she spotted a weird looking creature in the centre of her garden. It was standing on her favourite flower, but when she blinked it disappeared in a flash. “What was that? I hope it does not come back!” Maren gasped in horror... 

By Atarah

The dark, purple portal was terrifying. All around me there were so many swirls. There were purple, pink and blue swirls around everything. Quickly, I turned and saw a strange figure! I ran for help. I ran faster and faster, because the strange figure was getting closer and closer all the time. Suddenly, the stranger shouted, “Come here!” 

Then I replied, “No, you monster! Leave me alone!” 

By Albi

This term's topics

English - We are starting the year by exploring the story of The Spider and the Fly, which we will use to revise our key sentence structure and punctuation knowledge. After that, we will move on to work on writing and presenting persuasive speeches, using The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs, by Jon Scieszka as our core text. During this unit, we will work on extending our use of conjunctions to link and extend ideas and precise noun choices to make our ideas specific. We will also explore the way authors use rhetorical questions and alliteration to ‘sell’ their ideas. We will then draw all of these skills together to write our own persuasive speeches and present them to the rest of the class.

Maths - All three maths group will be starting the year by focussing on place value, developing our understanding of whole numbers to 10,000. We will learn to partition these numbers into thousands, hundreds, tens and ones, and regroup them in lots of different ways. We will practice comparing, ordering and rounding, as well as finding 1000 more or less than a given number. After that, we will move on to addition and subtraction. We will start with mental strategies, using our partitioning and regrouping skills to quickly find totals, before moving on to revise our understanding of written ‘column’ strategies. Throughout the term, we will also be practicing our recall of key times table facts.

Science - We will be exploring the way sounds are made and the way in which they travel. We will examine the vibrations created by a range of different instruments and think about the way that the pitch and volume can be changed on specific devices. We will carry out fair tests to check our predictions, and then investigate which materials to use to make ear defenders.

Humanities - For our Natural Disasters topic, we will be investigating volcanoes and earthquakes and mapping the places where they are common. We will be looking at the impact that these disasters have had on people around the world, as well as investigating why they occur in the first place. We will then explore other types of natural events, such as hurricanes, flooding and tornadoes, and find out how people who live in areas where these are common protect themselves against these disasters.

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