Welcome to Fox class! Our teacher is Mr Hollingsworth, who has been at Bedwell ever since he started teaching. He is really good at history and geography, and he says his favourite things are sports (especially American Football), dogs and Star Wars. He doesn’t like cats. very much, and although he’s not scared of many things, he does find bats a bit creepy!

• All about Year 5 - our class presentation
• Our curriculum map - find out about our current topics
• Our latest class newsletter
• Meet our school councilors, Ruby and Devarni

Home learning ideas:

• We have started using Google Classroom in class, so we will be familiar with it as a platform for learning beyond school. Login details have been sent to all parents.
• We are regularly set maths tasks and challenges via Mathletics, and should all know how to log in - let your teacher know if you can't get on. We've also started using Times Table Rock Stars to support us in learning our tables facts.
• 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.  
• Our history topic might be within living memory of some of family members - if so, it would be great to share their memories of what life was like during World War 2. Were any great-grandparents evacuees? What do you know about any family members who fought or worked during the War? There are loads of movies, video clips and archive materials available online to support learning about life during the War - the BBC Class Clips site is a great place to start. 
  
• In science, we are exploring evolution and adaptation. Keep an eye out for animals when you’re out and about, and think about how they’re suited to their environment - do their colours help them to stay hidden? How do they keep warm in winter? There are also some great lessons available online to support our next science topic here, on the Oak Academy site.
• 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 started the term with a DT project that saw us constructing motorised vehicles. We used saws and glue guns to build a wooden chassis, then added motors, batteries, gears and pulleys to make them race across the carpet (and crash into the wall!)
 
• In science this term, we have been exploring electrical circuits. We have revised the features (and components) that are needed to build a working circuit, and have learnt to draw and interpret circuit diagrams. We also constructed a variety of different switches and planned experiments to find out how you can change the brightness of a bulb in a circuit.  
 

 
• School Council elections - One of our first tasks this term was to elect our new School Councillors. We thought carefully about the skills we thought a good class representative should have, what we liked about our school and how it could be improved further. Building on this, we then drew on all our understanding to write speeches, ’selling’ ourselves to the rest of our class and showing why we’d be the perfect Councillor. It was a tough choice, with loads of us making fantastic speeches, but once voting was complete and all the ballots had been counted, we elected Ruby and Devarni. You can read their speeches here.     
 
• We had a busy (and very festive) end to the Autumn Term, with fantastic Christmas parties on Tuesday, followed by our school Christmas Dinner on Wednesday. Our parties were a particularly big hit, with some hotly contested games followed by loads of party food - a big thank you to everyone who contributed towards the costs of this. 
 

We have been learning about... 

Remote Learning - During lockdown, we have been working really hard on Google Classroom. For English we have written reports about elves, describing their appearance, habitats and diets. We had a variety of excellent ideas from fire elves to crystal elves and everything else in between. In maths, we have been learning how to carry out core operations with fractions, as well as identifying angles and calculating the area and perimeter of 2D shapes. Our learning has tried to cover several of the subjects we would learn at school including science, history (WW2), art and PE. We have also really enjoyed our Friday afternoon live lessons from The National aquarium. So far we have learned about underwater volcanoes, how to navigate the oceans and a focus on squids. For example, a squid has a beak!!! Who knew?

This term's topics

English - We will be investigating different fiction genres, looking at the types of characters, settings and plot we find in mystery, fantasy, historical, romance and adventure stories. We will then use this understanding to look at the way authors can combine features from more than one genre to engage or surprise the reader, building up to writing genre mash-up stories of our own. Through our writing, we will be developing the way we can use a range of punctuation to separate clauses. We will also be bringing home key spellings to practice. Throughout our English unit, we will be reading and exploring lots of stories relating to World War 2, particularly those involving evacuees and prisoners of war.

Maths - In Foxes, we will begin by developing our problem solving skills using addition, subtraction and multiplication. We will then move on to develop our fraction knowledge, learning to add, order and multiply fractions. After this, we will return to measures, developing our ability to convert between different units of length and mass.

Science - Our next topic focuses on evolution. We will be learning how living things have changed over time, adapting to suit their specific environment. We will investigate the evidence for the theory of evolution, looking at what fossils can tell us about the living things that lived on Earth millions of years ago. We will also be learning about the work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace.

Humanities - We will be investigating World War 2 and the Battle of Britain this term. After investigating which countries were involved on each side, we will be exploring how the War affected the lives of children and experiencing what life was like for evacuees. We will also explore the impact of the Battle of Britain, identifying the location of air bases on each side, the tactics used and the reasons why the attack was ultimately unsuccessful.

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