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 our A Land Far, Far Away topic with a fantastic Fairytale Day! We came dressed as our favourite characters, completed a circuit session and made jam tarts which we all thoroughly enjoyed.
  
 

 
• In science we have been looking closely at materials and their properties, using language like absorbent, magnetic, waterproof and durable. Our work on fairy tales saw us searching for the best material to solve their problems, such as finding the right material to build a house for the Three Little Pigs. We also loved getting involved in this year's Science Week.
 

 
• Our fairy tale theme weaved its way into our DT work as well, as we designed and created a hand puppet of our favourite character, learning how to cut materials, thread a needle, sew and glue.
 

 
• We have all enjoyed going to Forest School every Friday. We have used all our superhero powers in a number of activities. We’ve made group mandalas, log dogs, been on a colour hunt and learnt about the forest environment. We have also made cheese straws, chocolate firework sticks, smores and our favourite hot chocolate on the fire. 
 

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 - We began by learning the story of Little Red Riding Hood. We explored a variety of fairy-tales, looking at the types of characters we found (with lots of heroes, princesses, talking animals and evil wolves and witches). We thought about the types of places where these stories took place, and eventually created new fairy-tales of our own. 

We then moved on to explore persuasive letters. We used a letter to the Big Bad Wolf as our starting point, looking at the ways in which our model letter tried to persuade him to be a bit less Big and Bad (and a bit more kind and helpful!) We then used these skills to write our own persuasive letters. We wrote to the Easter Bunny (asking for eggs) and then to any character we chose – everything from asking Godzilla to be a bit less scary, to asking Harry Kane to play football with us! Throughout all of this, our main focus has been writing in sentences, adjectives and letter structure.

Maths - This term we have been focussing on number. We have used part-part-whole templates and tens frames to help us add and subtract using these numbers. We have also looked at doubling and halving numbers to 20.

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.