Welcome to Rabbit class! On Mondays and Tuesdays, we are taught by Mrs Humber, who has been teaching at Bedwell for 17 years and is brilliant at art. On Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays our teacher is Mrs Rose, who has been teaching at Bedwell for 9 years. She really likes science and storytelling, and is determined to make her lessons as much fun as possible!

• Our curriculum map - find out about our current topics
• Our latest class newsletter
• Meet our School Councillors, Bibi and Riley 

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. 
• Investigate what magnets stick to - fridge magnets work fine, and you can investigate lots of different materials around the house. Try different metals and help your child discover that magnets only stick to some of them (mostly iron and steel). There are lessons to support our science topic available on the Oak Academy website.  
  
• We’re learning about water in Geography, but we're disappointingly short on big rivers in our part of Hertfordshire, so if the opportunity arrives for a visit to an interesting lake or riverside (on the way back from a day out or just for a Sunday afternoon walk), that’d be great - we’d love to hear about it (and share some photos) in class. 
• 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 have undertaken a real challenge this half-term, making our own hand puppets… and they look amazing! We all tried sewing, with some of us needing no help whatsoever! Check out a few examples below:   
 

 
•  In science, we have been learning all about our digestive system and our teeth. As part of this we set up an investigation, using egg shell as ‘teeth’ and observing the damage caused by different liquids. We all enjoyed checking on the progress of the different eggs - and were shocked to learn that the liquid that seemed to do the most damage was the sugar free orange squash!
  
 

 
• We rounded-off the term with a fantastic Christmas party, full of games, dancing and food! 
 

We have been learning about... 

English - In English, we kicked off our persuasive writing unit with a walk around Fairlands Park, looking for signs of pollution. We found lots – and so we finished our unit by writing a letter to Stevenage Council, highlighting the pollution problem and suggesting lots of ways in which the council could help.

Geography - 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 - Our next fiction topic focuses on Science Fiction stories, so expect our writing to be full of aliens, robots, space ships and time travellers! We will be exploring different ways that feelings are shown in writing, including through description, speech and the use of emotive language. We will continue to develop our vocabulary, finding just the right word to describe the aliens and space ships we encounter, while also expanding the range of adverbials of time and place that we use to open sentences and link ideas together. In our reading lessons, meanwhile, we will be developing our predicting, summarising and detective skills, looking for those key clues that show us how characters feel and what they are likely to do next. 

Maths - Our main focus at the start of term will be on multiplication and division strategies. We will learn to use formal written strategies to multiply and divide 2-digit numbers by 1-digit numbers (solving calculations like 34 x 4 or 84 ÷ 6). We will then use these strategies to solve a variety of problems. Later in the term we will be returning to the topic of time, recognising how days, weeks, months and years are linked and then learning to read and write the times shown on analogue clocks (with hands). Throughout the term, we will also continue to practice and learn our tables facts, aiming to complete our Star (x2, x5 and x10 tables) and Superstar (x3, x4 and x6 tables) by the time we start Year 4.

Science - We will be exploring different types of forces, including pushes, pulls, gravity and friction, and thinking about the way that these affect the way that objects move in different situations. We will design and carry out fair tests to see which materials create the most friction, and to discover which materials stick to magnets. We will also investigate different ways in which we can measure forces.

Humanities - Water is all around us and vital to every type of life, and in this topic we will be learning about the way that the Water Cycle means that it is constantly being reused and recycled. We will locate the world’s major oceans, seas and rivers on a variety of maps, and discuss the difference between fresh water and sea water (and why it matters). We will also investigate the impact of water on environments, both shaping landscapes and effecting the growth of many towns and cities.

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