Welcome to Dormouse class! Our teacher is Mrs Jackson, who has been teaching for 19 years, and has worked at Bedwell for the last 10. Her favourite things are Lindt chocolate and reading her Kindle. She doesn’t like running very much, and is scared of spiders!

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

Home learning ideas:

• Try to do as much maths as you can when you're out and about:
  • Keep on practicing counting whenever and wherever you can - how many cars are there in the street? How many trees in the field? How many trollies in the supermarket, players on the team or stairs on the way to bed? Our focus is on numbers from 10-20 this term, so things that come in groups of this size are ideal for counting practice.
  • Practice writing numbers in sand, salt or water, or try making numbers out of groups of pebbles.
  • Practice counting in 2s, 5s and 10s - counting in multiples as you go up or down stairs; counting in 2s as you pair up socks; totalling up everyone’s fingers and toes by counting in 5s...
• Constant practice of reading and phonics is just about the most valuable thing you can do at home. Try to read with your child as often as possible and talk to them about what they’ve read - we've put together some guidance and advice on using the books your child will bring home here.  
• We follow the Read Write Inc phonics programme, and they have provided lots of guidance on supporting your child at home, which you can read here.
• We will continue to explore the idea of change over time, recognising that the world around us does not stay the same and that the lives we live now are different to those experienced by our parents and grandparents when they were our age. We will be thinking about our town in particular, looking at older photos and maps of Stevenage and using these resources to investigate the way that it has changed over the last 100 years.
• Throughout the year we are exploring how our environment changes with the seasons. You could build on this at home in lots of ways - exploring the park, making maps or looking for signs of autumn and winter on the way to and from school. What do we do differently as the weather gets colder? What do animals do to prepare for the colder months ahead?

Our latest news:

• We had a brilliant day out at the seaside, to link in with our work on seaside environments. Having chosen Clacton-on-Sea as our destination, we enjoyed a fabulous day out, with incredible weather and lots of happy smiling faces. We built sandcastles, searched for shells and buried each other in the sand before devouring our packed lunches. In the afternoon, some of us continued building in the sand, while others got out the frisbees and beach balls for some fun games. A few of us were even brave enough to dip our toes in the sea, but as the water wasn’t very warm (and to keep everyone safe) we decided not to let the water go above our ankles. We finished off with ice cream and lollies on the seafront, before heading back to the coach. You could tell how busy our day had been by the number of us who quickly fell asleep on the way home!
 

 
• We followed up our trip to the seaside with a Stay and Make afternoon focussing on seaside-themed art projects.  
 

 
• We threw ourselves wholeheartedly into this year's Sports Week - our scootering session was a definite highlight, and it was great to see how many of our parents and carers came to support us at our Sports Day.     
 

 
• We had a lovely Stay and Count session where our parents joined us to play maths games in class. We were delighted that so many of you were able to join us!
 

 
• We have been learning about India and comparing it to life in the UK. We have explored Rangoli patterns and have created our own using tissue paper and glue. To finish off our topic, we organised a fantastic India Day, which included cooking, dance, art and cricket. 
 

 

We have been learning about... 

Maths - We have worked on many skills within maths this term and are now confident counting to 100 and saying what a two digit number is made of. We have learnt about halves and quarters and used this knowledge to say whether a cup is half full, a quarter full or at full capacity.

English - We have enjoyed creating poetry comics. We first looked at alliteration and enjoyed making up alliterative sentences which we turned into a whole class poem about Summer. We then looked at antonyms and made a poetry comic all about opposites. We have loved our playful, perfect poems!

This term's topics

English - We will begin the half-term by returning to story writing, using Last Stop on Market Street, by Matt de la Peña as our starting point. We will use this text to explore the way that characters and settings are described, and will also be working on the use of conjunctions to link ideas together. After that, we will move on to letter writing, this time using Dragon Post by Emma Yarlett as our core text. We will learn about the way letters are organised and then write some of our own, asking for help and describing our discoveries! Throughout the term, we will continue to work on sentence construction, ensuring that we use full stops and capital letters correctly.

Maths - We will begin by focussing on mental addition and subtraction, becoming quicker and more confident in our use of numbers to 100 by building on our knowledge of place value and number bonds. We will then apply these skills to measure and missing number problems. Later in the term we will move on to working with money, making totals using a variety of different coins and working out change when we are shopping. We will then investigate the language of comparison, using phrases like difference, more, less and fewer, before finishing the term by beginning to estimate and measure using different scales.

Science - We will continue to explore the four seasons that make up our year, identifying the way that our environment changes as we move from autumn to winter. We will head outside to collect evidence of these changes, and record our observations. We will also investigate the ways in which different animals prepare for the colder weather.

Humanities - We will continue to explore the idea of change over time, recognising that the world around us does not stay the same and that the lives we live now are different to those experienced by our parents and grandparents when they were our age. We will be thinking about our town in particular, looking at older photos and maps of Stevenage and using these resources to investigate the way that it has changed over the last 100 years.

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