Welcome to Moles class! Our teacher is Mr Humber, who has been teaching for sixteen years, the last eight of which have been at Bedwell. He is really good at art, history and maths, and he says his favourite things are rugby and pizza!

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

Home learning ideas:

• As always, tables facts will be really important to us this term, so it would be brilliant if you could work on learning these at home. Focus on one table at a time and try:
  • Making-up rhymes to help remember number facts (“4 x 6 is 24, bears growl and lions roar!”) 
  • Looking for numbers in that table in the world around you - on doors, car number plates, in phone numbers or when you’re out shopping. 
  • Writing-out tables with finger paints, chalk or water-on-tarmac, or make them from playdoh. 
  • Chanting, singing, whispering... Say tables out loud together whenever you have the chance. 
• 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 work on grouping animals relies on us having lots of science knowledge, so talk about creatures you see when you’re out and about - what do they eat? Where do they live? What other living things are they similar to? Don’t worry if this involves some ‘let’s Google that when we get home’ - realising that it’s OK not to know everything is a Learning Superhero skill!
  
• If you’re looking for an afternoon out, many of our local museums have Anglo-Saxon finds and relics amongst their collections - including Stevenage, Hertford and Ware Museums (all of which are free to enter). Check their websites for more details on visiting.
  
•  There are more resources to support the teaching of this topic on the BBC Bitesize history site at: www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zxsbcdm
  
• You can have a go at coding in Scratch by heading to scratch.mit.edu or downloading the Scratch app. There are loads and loads of tutorials, ideas and examples of other people’s work available on the Scratch site.
  

Our latest news:

• To celebrate World Book Day, we got into costume, dressing-up as our favourite storybook characters. We were really impressed with the range of characters and stories on show, with everything from the Wizard of Oz to David Walliams to Star Wars!
 

 
• We thoroughly enjoyed getting involved in this year’s Science Week. A particular highlight was our session with the visiting planetarium, where we learnt about the solar system, stars and planets in a huge inflatable dome. We also had great fun completing this year’s Knex challenge, where we had to build a protective helmet, and our annual Egg Drop competition, where we worked in pairs to build a contraption capable of safely transporting an egg from the classroom roof to the ground below.
 

  
• This term we visited Milton Keynes theatre to watch Horrible Histories: Awful Egyptians. As well as being educational, the show also brought everything to life. We watched a body be mummified, learnt about the life of Rameses II, found out why the Gods were so important, and much more.
  
 

  
• Our Year 3/4 sports teams have done really well this term, with gold medals for both our Girls and Boys Indoor Athletics teams and a silver for our Rapid Fire Cricket team (pictured below). Over 25 of us have also played football for school this term, including 15 of us who took part in the Stevenage Schools Year 3/4 Girls Football Festival. 
  
 

We have been learning about... 

Textiles - We have spent the last half-term learning how to stitch. First we learnt a simple running stitch followed by a back stitch. Once we had become proficient at those two stitches, we designed ourselves as superheroes and began the process of cutting out all the bits we needed to create our final pieces. First we used the running stitch to attach faces, hands and belts, then we sewed the two sides together. 

History - Our topic this term has been the Ancient Egyptians, and we have loved learning about their world - especially the messy facts about how they made their mummies! We have also explored their Gods, clothes, food and lifestyle, and have begun to investigate the way that they used hieroglyphics.

English - In English we read the story of Alice in Wonderland and were tasked with writing out own versions. We learnt about similes, prepositions and expanded noun phrases which we worked hard to include in our writing. Below are a few examples of how our stories began: 

Alice landed with a tremendous thud. An icy wind increased furiously around, as crunchy leaves spun around her feet. Surrounding her were spikey bushes as jagged as knives and the distant mountains were covered in thick ice. Crows screeched above her, and branches hung from trees like witches fingers. Alice felt uneasy and knew something was wrong, so she decided to head into the forest. Her heart was pounding as it grew darker and darker. - By William

Alice landed with an almighty bump. Towering mountains of ice stood watch over the forest. All around her Alice saw suspicious shadows creeping in all directions. Jet black crows were screeching, branches hung from twisted trees and a scent of decay was in the air. The darkness was so overwhelming that Alice could barely see. - By Teddy 

Pitch black, ancient birds flew around the ebony sky making screeching sounds as the shadows crept in every direction. Alice could hear the wind howling like wolves. Alice did not feel safe so she bravely headed further in to the: damp, pitch black forest. Moments later, from behind a spikey bush, came a muffled scream. Alice’s heart instantly pounded in despair and her face turned pale. - By Kamelia.

This term's topics

English - We will begin the term by exploring persuasive letters and speeches, using Clean Up!, Look Up! and Speak Up! by Nathan Bryon as our core texts. We will investigate the use of paragraphs to organise ideas and rhetorical questions to engage and convince the reader, as well as exploring the difference between spoken and written arguments. We will complete the unit by writing our own persuasive letters. Later in the term we will be shifting our focus to instructions, building our work around Wolf in the Snow by Matthew Cordell. We will revise the way in which instructions are organised and develop our ability to edit and improve our writing, and will then use these skills to write instructions for a journey.

Maths - Our main focus at the start of term will be on multiplication and division strategies. We will start by revising strategies to x and ÷ by 10, 100 and 1000, and will then learn to use formal written methods to multiply and divide 2-digit numbers by 1-digit numbers (solving calculations like 34 x 4 or 84 ÷ 6). Later in the term we will be exploring statistics, interpreting information shown in bar charts and line graphs. Throughout the term, we will also continue to practice our tables facts, with those of us in Year 3 aiming to complete our Star (x2, x5 and x10 tables) and Superstar (x3, x4 and x6 tables) by the time we start Year 4, while those of us in Year 4 get ready for our tables check in June.

Science - We will be investigating the way that living things can be grouped –in particular by what they eat, by where they live and by their family (fish, reptiles, mammals etc.) We will use classification keys to sort and identify living things in the world around us and food chains to show how predators and prey are linked. We will also be thinking about the effect that humans have on our environment.

Humanities - Our focus for the next term will be the Anglo- Saxons. We will begin by placing them on a timeline, relating them to other periods and civilisations that we have already learnt about, before investigating their origins, including where they came from and why they invaded Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries. We will identify the areas where they settled and discover the effect that they had on the lands that they moved to, particularly spreading Christianity and the first creation of an English nation. Finally we will discover what life was like for these warrior farmers, including investigating how they lived, what they ate and what it was like for young Anglo-Saxon children.

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