Welcome to Moles class! Our teacher is Mr Humber, who has been teaching for fifteen years, the last six 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 class newsletter
• Meet our school councilors, Poppy and Jaden

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.  
• 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. 
  
• 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.
• We’re focussing on newspaper recounts, so encourage your child to read a newspaper and think about the way that information is presented. This doesn’t need to be complicated politics - local news in The Comet or sports reports on the back page all count! 
• 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 organised a Pirate Map Day, linked to our English unit. First we got together as a class to collect ideas for as many different pirate locations as we could. We were actually very good at this and soon had a huge bank of ideas for places like Skull Island, Dead Man’s Forest, Misty Mountains and Blackbeard’s Inn. After this we drew the outline of our island, learning how to make it 3D, we added all the detail to our maps including beaches, coves, forests, mountains and anything else we deemed worthy of a pirate. 
 

  
• During the first of our two Egyptian days this term, we found out about the mummification process and really got down to the gritty details of this ancient method of preserving bodies. Next we turned our attention to the burial stage and were tasked with having to design a sarcophagus. We used acrylic paint for our designs and as you can see they were very detailed, just like the real ones.
  
 

 
• We loved getting involved in this year's Science Week, which included animal workshops with Teaching Talons, a challenging Knex Challenge and our annual Egg Drop competition.  
 

We have been learning about... 

English - In Mole class we have been living and breathing pirates for the last 6 weeks and it has been so much fun. After learning what makes a good explanation, and finding out about causal conjunctions, time openers and present tense we took the plunge and began writing explanations for pirate ships, cannons, hobbies, eye patches and anything else we could think of. We had a blast and put our imaginations to good use.  

Geography - In our geography lessons we have been exploring a range of natural disasters. We investigated the effect that they can have on local communities, the reasons why they occur and some of the things that people are doing to try to limit their effects.

This term's topics

English - We’re focussing on recounts this term - non-fiction writing that retells events that happened in the past. We’ll start by looking at lots of different examples of these, from informal diaries and postcards to formal news articles and letters. We will secure our understanding of past tense and look at the difference balance between description, opinions and reported speech that we find in each format. We will then focus in on newspaper recounts in particular, drawing on our work in other lessons to write exciting articles on everything from Sports Day to Anglo-Saxon invasions. We will interview each other in-character to get quotes from eye-witnesses and will use descriptive detail and well-chosen words to bring scenes to life.

Maths - We’ll start the half-term with a big push on times tables in preparation for our Multiplication Tables Check, which is coming up in the first two weeks of June. After that, we’ll be developing our understanding of co-ordinates, plotting points to create different shapes and identifying missing co-ordinates to complete polygons, We will then translate these shapes by sliding them around co-ordinate grids, plotting new positions and using these skills to solve problems. All of this this will then lead into work on angles. We will learn to measure angles using protractors, identify equilateral, scalene and isosceles triangles and calculate missing angles in shapes using known facts.

Science - We will be completing our work on 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 and construct 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 - We will continue to develop our understanding of life in Anglo-Saxon Britain. We will be learning more about the areas where the first Anglo-Saxons settled and investigating their culture, food, homes and beliefs. We will explore the impact their arrival had, spreading Christianity and the creating the first English nation. Throughout the topic, we will be using images of ancient artefacts (from coins and small fragments of pottery to huge sites like Sutton Hoo) to support our learning and to help us develop the ability to think like a historian.

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