Welcome to Fieldmouse class! Our teacher is Mrs Wren, who has joined Bedwell this year and loves making our lessons as active and fun-filled as possible.

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

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. 
• We’re focussing on exploring and talking about our local area, so why not do the same? Can you find a new park or place to go in Stevenage that you’ve not explored together before? Could you take a few pictures or make a map of the area to share in class and help us to talk about what makes our town different to other local places?
  
• 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 the term with our Christmas show. We were so proud that so many of you were able to come and watch us, and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did! 
  
 

 
• In art we have looked at a number of different artists that use natural materials to create their artwork, including Andy Goldsworthy, Lois Ehlert and Guiseppe Arcimboldo. We had lots of fun exploring and creating in these different styles, using natural objects we found in both our forest and in our local park.  
 

 
• Linked to our work on instructions in English we took part in a brilliant crumble making workshop with our families. We worked together to follow instructions, mix ingredients, peel and chop fruit - and then taste our fantastic crumbles!
 

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 have been learning a non-fiction text about How to Make a Pizza. We have been looking at the structure of a set of instructions and learning about what each section is for and how each step starts with a bossy word (imperative verb). We then changed the instructions to make a pizza of our choice. A lot of them had some very interesting toppings that not all of us were sure we wanted to try! Finally we invented our own set of instructions on how to make a new sleigh for Santa to help him at this busy time of year.

Maths - In maths 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 - Next half-term, we will be looking at a ‘rags to riches’ tale. Our initial text will be The Story of Pirate Tom, which we will learn by heart, using symbols and actions, so that we can use the language and structure to support our writing. We will be focussing in particular on describing characters and introducing speech. We will also continue to develop the use of accurate sentence structure and careful, consistent handwriting. We will also be looking at non-fiction texts about animals and writing a recount of our holiday news.

Maths - We will begin the term by returning to our core counting, comparing and calculating skills, becoming increasingly confident (and speedy) when working with numbers to 20. This will then lead into work with money, finding different combinations of coins that add up to a given amount and then ordering and comparing prices and totals. Later in the term we will develop our ability to count in 2s, 5s and 10s. We will practice saying, recording, counting and memorising these values, so that we can quickly spot and recall them. Finally, we will explore measurement, measuring heights, lengths and weights using a mixture of standard (metres, cm, kg) and non-standard (hands, books, marbles etc.) units.

Science - We will be looking at common animals especially those we will see on our trip to the zoo. We will learn to identify and name fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals, recognising the key features of each group. We will also be finding out what animals eat and classifying them using the terms carnivores, herbivores and omnivores.

Humanities - We will be exploring our local area, investigating what the features, landmarks and ’best bits’ of Stevenage are. We will look at our position within England, the UK, Europe and the world, using a variety of different maps and recognise Stevenage from photographs, talking about the difference between our town and other areas in the UK. This will also give us the chance to develop our use of geographical vocabulary - both physical (river, lake, hill) and human (house, town, city, village, farm).

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