Welcome to Rabbit class! On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, our teacher is Mrs Thomas. She is really good at PE and Maths, and she says that her favourite things are football and spending time with her family. On Thursdays and Fridays, we are taught by Mr Lester. He loves Watford Football Club and spending time with his family, but he doesn’t like parsnips very much and is scared of heights!

• All about Year 3 and 4 - our class presentation
• Our curriculum map - find out about our current topics
• Our latest class newsletter
• Meet our school councilors, Eryn and Lenny

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 out 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. 
• In history this term we are learning about the Ancient Egyptians, which provides lots of opportunities for learning beyond the classroom - try investigating the history, and making a picture or model of an Egyptian pyramid. There's lots of information, video and links to get you started available here on the BBC Bitesize webiste. 
• To support our science, investigate sounds you can make around the house - what noises can we make when we tap bottles, table tops, toys etc. What links are there between the material / size and the sound produced? There are also some great lessons available online to support our next science topic 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 learning about levers and linkages, which we then combined to build some fantastic moving puppets. 
 
• In science this term, we have been learning about the human body. We have revised the features that all living things share (there are seven - see if you can remember them all), and then explored the role of the human skeleton. We built models to help us understand how muscles work, and next we'll be learning about how the digestive system works.     
 

 
• 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 Eryn and Lenny. 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 - we went on a spy mission in our Mission Possible unit, writing some fantastic adventure stories. We then moved on to look at persuasive writing with our Gadgets and Gizmos topic. Daily live lessons with our teachers helped us to stay in contact with each other, and have also made the work much easier to understand!

English - The classic legend of Gawain and the Green Knight was the basis of our English learning. To get us hooked into the story, we took part in a fencing session at the start of term. We learned the skills of using a foil, how to stand, attack and defend – just like one of King Arthur’s knights! We competed for the silver helmet and had great fun throughout the day. From there, we explored the story in depth. We learnt it by heart, using actions to support us, and thought carefully about the language used and the way characters and settings were described.

PSHE - Chloe Co-operation has been our learning super hero this half term. Our assemblies and PSHE lessons have promoted the values of diversity, equality, trust and tolerance. Across the term we have embraced the ideals of inclusion and thought carefully about how to celebrate our differences. We have also identified our strengths and helped our friends to be proud of theirs.

This term's topics

English - This half-term we will be focussing on adventure stories with an Egyptian theme: the Pharoah’s precious amulet has been stolen....Can Hett track down the suspect and save the day? As always, we will begin by learning a model text, using symbols and actions to support us, and will then look closely at the way the text is structured and the language used to build excitement and tension. We will also use this as an opportunity to secure our understanding of punctuation, focussing on the use of inverted commas for dialogue and the use of the possessive apostrophe.

Maths - In Rabbit class, we will begin by revising the properties of shapes, before moving on to explore decimals. We will relate these to our understanding of fractions and money, and begin to solve simple decimal problems.

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 - Our next history topic will see us learning about the Ancient Egyptians. In this unit, we will look at many areas of life for these ancient people including their burial rituals and the afterlife. We will look at the role of the Pharaoh in their society, as well as the importance of the River Nile. We will also investigate what remains of their civilisation and think about the reasons why they are remembered today.

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