Welcome to Dormouse class! Our teacher is Mrs Devenish, who has been teaching at Bedwell for 15 years and loves making our lessons as creative as possible. Her favourite things are cooking and being outdoors, although she doesn’t like snow very much, and is scared of spiders.

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

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.
• 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. Visit the Oak National Academy for useful resources. 
• 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 finished off the term with our Forest Day. We learnt a variety of new skills and made lots of natural crafts. The afternoon was topped off with den building out on the field, followed by the chance to roast marshmallows on the fire to make smores.
  
 

 
• In art we have explored African Art and loved sharing our ‘Come and Make’ session with you. This linked in with our work in geography, where we have looked at the natural and physical features of the UK, and then compared these with the features of Kenya. We also learnt to find and name the 7 continents on a map.
 

 
• In science we have been looking closely at plants and animals. We have been able to name and label the parts of a plant and explore how they grow. We have grouped animals by type, by where they live, by how they move and by what they eat. To support our learning we visited Whipsnade Zoo, where we got to meet lots of the animals we have investigated. It was interesting to read the signs and find out what animal group each creature belonged to, what they ate and which continent they came from. We could remember lots of these facts when we got back to class, and were really keen to talk about the animals we had met.
 

 
• One of the highlights of our term was our brilliant Sports Week - we particularly enjoyed the scooter and trampolining sessions, and loved getting to compete in our Sports Day races in front of so many of our parents and carers.
 

We have been learning about... 

Reading - We take part in daily Read Write Inc sessions. This is the helping us with our phonics, reading and writing within ability groups. We have also looked at our favourite books and shared them within the class and written book reviews.

English - In English we have been learning the story of Lost and Found and The Diary of Ranger Rich. We have explored adventure stories and have worked on adding conjunctions, time adverbials and adjectives to make our sentences even better. 

Maths - We have been learning to tell the time using o’clock and half past the hour, and learning to count in multiple of 2s, 5s and 10s. We have also explored fractions, finding halves and quarters.

This term's topics

English - Our final English topic of the year will see us exploring diary writing and recounts, building around the adventures of Ranger Rick. We will be focusing on describing characters and settings, as well as using time words to link ideas together. We will also continue to develop our sentence structure and handwriting, making sure we have secured our understanding of full stops and capital letters ready for Year 2 and 3. During the term we will also be reading lots of non-fiction texts about animals and life in Africa to support our learning in science and geography. We will continue to develop our phonics knowledge in small groups during our daily Read Write Inc. sessions.

Maths - Our maths lessons over the next half-term will see us exploring multiplication and division. We will be investigating equal and unequal groups, representing multiplication with arrays and using repeated addition to find answers. We will also be using practical resources to share out objects, leading towards simple division problems. Later in the term, we will be investigating time, learning to identify o’clock and half-past times, as well as exploring the way we find halves and quarters of groups, quantities and shapes. Finally, we will continue to practice our number bonds and addition facts daily, making sure that our quick recall of these is really sharp in preparation for the move up to Years 2 and 3.

Science - We will be learning about animals, particularly those found on the African plains. We will be learning to classify them into different groups, recognising the difference between fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. We will also identify the differences between herbivores, carnivores and omnivores, and finding out what foods our favourite animals like to eat.

Humanities - We have learnt a lot about the geography of the UK this year, and we will now use this understanding to compare our country with Kenya. We will learn about Kenya’s weather, landmarks, environment and wildlife, and use this to help us to understand what life is like in a different country.

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