Welcome to Dormouse class! Our teacher is Mrs Jackson, who has been teaching for 19 years, and has worked at Bedwell for the last 10. Her favourite things are Lindt chocolate and reading her Kindle. She doesn’t like running very much, and is scared of spiders!

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

Home learning ideas:

• Try to do as much maths as you can when you're out and about:
  • Keep on practicing counting whenever and wherever you can - how many cars are there in the street? How many trees in the field? How many trollies in the supermarket, players on the team or stairs on the way to bed? Our focus is on numbers from 10-20 this term, so things that come in groups of this size are ideal for counting practice.
  • Practice writing numbers in sand, salt or water, or try making numbers out of groups of pebbles.
  • Practice counting in 2s, 5s and 10s - counting in multiples as you go up or down stairs; counting in 2s as you pair up socks; totalling up everyone’s fingers and toes by counting in 5s...
• Constant practice of reading and phonics is just about the most valuable thing you can do at home. Try to read with your child as often as possible and talk to them about what they’ve read - we've put together some guidance and advice on using the books your child will bring home here.  
• We follow the Read Write Inc phonics programme, and they have provided lots of guidance on supporting your child at home, which you can read here.
• The core learning in our next history topic is about recognising the difference between ‘old’ and ‘new’ things and understanding that things change over time - so any discussions that link to this would be really useful. What things in your area have changed over the last few years? Did the toys that your children play with exist when you were a child? What different things did you do when you were their age?
• Throughout the year we are exploring how our environment changes with the seasons. You could build on this at home in lots of ways - exploring the park, making maps or looking for signs of autumn and winter on the way to and from school. What do we do differently as the weather gets colder? What do animals do to prepare for the colder months ahead?

Our latest news:

• We had a brilliant day out at the seaside, to link in with our work on seaside environments. Having chosen Clacton-on-Sea as our destination, we enjoyed a fabulous day out, with incredible weather and lots of happy smiling faces. We built sandcastles, searched for shells and buried each other in the sand before devouring our packed lunches. In the afternoon, some of us continued building in the sand, while others got out the frisbees and beach balls for some fun games. A few of us were even brave enough to dip our toes in the sea, but as the water wasn’t very warm (and to keep everyone safe) we decided not to let the water go above our ankles. We finished off with ice cream and lollies on the seafront, before heading back to the coach. You could tell how busy our day had been by the number of us who quickly fell asleep on the way home!
 

 
• We followed up our trip to the seaside with a Stay and Make afternoon focussing on seaside-themed art projects.  
 

 
• We threw ourselves wholeheartedly into this year's Sports Week - our scootering session was a definite highlight, and it was great to see how many of our parents and carers came to support us at our Sports Day.     
 

 
• We had a lovely Stay and Count session where our parents joined us to play maths games in class. We were delighted that so many of you were able to join us!
 

 
• We have been learning about India and comparing it to life in the UK. We have explored Rangoli patterns and have created our own using tissue paper and glue. To finish off our topic, we organised a fantastic India Day, which included cooking, dance, art and cricket. 
 

 

We have been learning about... 

Maths - We have worked on many skills within maths this term and are now confident counting to 100 and saying what a two digit number is made of. We have learnt about halves and quarters and used this knowledge to say whether a cup is half full, a quarter full or at full capacity.

English - We have enjoyed creating poetry comics. We first looked at alliteration and enjoyed making up alliterative sentences which we turned into a whole class poem about Summer. We then looked at antonyms and made a poetry comic all about opposites. We have loved our playful, perfect poems!

This term's topics

English - Our first English unit of the year is built around the story of The Frog and the Stranger by Max Velthuijs. We will explore the characters in the story and collect descriptive vocabulary. We will develop our sentence writing by adding the conjunctions and, or and but to link ideas, and will then write our own short stories to describe imaginary events. After that, we will be focussing on instructions, using How to Make Friends with a Ghost by Rebecca Green as our core text. Throughout the term, we will continue to develop our phonics knowledge through our daily Read Write Inc sessions, working in small groups to learn, decode and blend new sounds.

Maths - Our focus at the start of the year will be place value, ensuring we can order, regroup and compare numbers. We will begin with numbers to 20 and will then extend our understanding to make it all the way to 100. A key part of this learning will be to split numbers into ’tens and some more’, and we will use lots of resources (including tens frames, bead strings and base 10 blocks) to help us to cement this concept. Alongside this, we will also develop our counting skills, so that we can count on and back in ones and tens from any number to 100 (for instance, counting back in tens from 76). Finally, we will be introduced to the > and < symbols to show that numbers are greater than or less than each other.

Science - We will be learning about the four seasons, thinking about the way the world around us changes as we move from summer to autumn to winter. We will collect evidence of these changes, gathering leaves, seeds and flowers, and record our observations. We will also identify different types of weather that we associate with each season.

Humanities - We will be exploring our local area, investigating Our Changing Town. We will think about the ways in which our local area has changed since we (and our teachers) were born. We will think about ’new’ and ’old’ objects and will discuss toys and technology which exist now that didn’t exist when we were born. We will create a timeline of our own lives, and then work together to extend these to create timelines of our parents or teachers lives. We will also explore the local area first-hand, looking for evidence and examples of things that have changed since we were born.

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