Welcome to Rabbit class! Our teacher is Mrs Wren, who has been teaching at Bedwell for four years. She is really good at music and English, and wants to make her lessons fun, interactive and memorable.  

• Our curriculum map - find out about our current topics
• Our latest school newsletter
• Meet our School Councillors, Ola and Darcie

Home learning ideas:

• We’re working on tables facts 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. 
• We’re learning about volcanoes, earthquakes, floods and hurricanes, so if anyone in the family has first-hand experiences of these (that aren’t too scary), they would be great to share. Otherwise, see what you can find out about one of these natural disasters - the BBC Bitesize site has some great videos and animations here. 
• If you’re visiting London anytime soon, the Natural History Museum has a whole section devoted to volcanoes and earthquakes - you can find out more about visiting at www.nhm.ac.uk
• Explore sounds you can make around the house by tapping bottles, table tops or toys. What links are there between the material and the sound produced? Try making a cup and string telephone, and talk about how the sound is being transmitted - there are instructions at https://www.sciencekids.co.nz/projects/stringphone.html
• There’s some great advice on talking to children about online safety on the NSPCC website at www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/ We also use lots of resources from the UK Safer Internet Centre: saferinternet.org.uk/ 

Our latest news:

• At the start of June, Years 3 and 4 visited Celtic Harmony Camp in Hertford to support our history topic, which has focussed on life in Ancient Britain. We took part in a series of activities that helped us to understand what life was like in the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, building shelters, making bread, shaping tools, moulding pots and exploring the woodlands. We had a great day out and it really helped to bring the past to life!
 

 
• We organised a fantastic French Café, which saw the Infant Hall packed with families ordering pastries and drinks en français and putting all of the French we have learnt this year to good use.
 

 
• We loved getting involved in this year's Sports Week, which included skateboarding, rugby, netball, athletics and our massive Sports Day. We threw ourselves into every session with great enthusiasm, and discovered lots of new passions! 
 

 
• We rounded-off our geography topic with a brilliant USA Day. We all came to school dressed in red, white and blue (to represent the American flag), and then took part in art, cooking and PE sessions. We especially enjoyed making (and eating) our apple pies!
 
• This term, we have had the chance to take part in Fit Kidz activities as part of our weekly PE sessions. With lots of weights and fitness activities, they are a great way for us to build up our core strength and stamina - and it’s been lots of fun too! 
 

 
• As part of our history topic on Roman Britain, we made our own Roman shields. We cut out cardboard for the base of our shields and then added card shapes and patterns to make them look as authentic as possible. We finished the project by marching out onto the field in a classic Roman ‘tortoise’ formation! 
 

 
• We were delighted to be joined by so many of our parents and carers for our Stay and Read event. We talked about the reasons why reading regularly at home is so important, explored some of the things we can do to make it an enjoyable experience and shared lots of our favourite books. A big thank you to everyone who made time to join us in class. 
 

We have been learning about... 

Science - As part of our work on plants we carried out investigations to discover what they need to survive. We tried growing them in the dark, with no water or sealed in plastic bags (to give them no air). We recorded our observations carefully and used these to draw conclusions about the conditions needed for seeds to germinate and grow.   

English - We have covered lots of different types of writing this term, including personal narratives, calligram poems, character descriptions and dialogue. We particularly enjoyed our work on persuasion, exploring posters and persuasive letter writing techniques before drawing together all of our knowledge to write speeches, trying to convince our teachers that we should cut down on the amount of paper that we use.

Do you think that we should be cutting down trees? Did you know that we have spent £6000 on photocopying in a year? You know that paper is made from trees. If we keep cutting down trees there will not be anything left! 

Do you believe that cutting down tree is important? You are destroying the happy trees. You are never too small to make a decision. You should consider using online work. We could do online homework. Do you want to harm the poor animals? In class we could use whiteboards. Please do the right thing and make this change. 

By Sadaqat

This term's topics

English - We will be using a gorgeous book called Mini-Rabbit: Not Lost as the inspiration for our first English topic. We will explore the plot of the story, thinking about the way that authors shape adventures and the different types of endings that books can have. We will develop our understanding of tense, using the past tense consistently in our writing, and will use adjectives and noun phrases to add detail to our description of settings and characters. Finally, we will finish the topic by drawing together all of these skills to write stories of our own. In our reading lessons, meanwhile, we will be developing our prediction, summarising and inference skills through work on a variety of texts.

Maths - All three maths group will be starting the year by focussing on place value, developing our understanding of whole numbers to 10,000. We will learn to partition these numbers into thousands, hundreds, tens and ones, and regroup them in lots of different ways. We will practice comparing, ordering and rounding, as well as finding 1000 more or less than a given number. After that, we will move on to addition and subtraction. We will start with mental strategies, using our partitioning and regrouping skills to quickly find totals, before moving on to revise our understanding of written ‘column’ strategies. Throughout the term, we will also be practicing our recall of key times table facts.

Science - We will be exploring the way sounds are made and the way in which they travel. We will examine the vibrations created by a range of different instruments and think about the way that the pitch and volume can be changed on specific devices. We will carry out fair tests to check our predictions, and then investigate which materials to use to make ear defenders.

Humanities - For our Natural Disasters topic, we will be investigating volcanoes and earthquakes and mapping the places where they are common. We will be looking at the impact that these disasters have had on people around the world, as well as investigating why they occur in the first place. We will then explore other types of natural events, such as hurricanes, flooding and tornadoes, and find out how people who live in areas where these are common protect themselves against these disasters.

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