Welcome to Dormouse class! Our teacher is Mrs Jackson, who has been teaching for 17 years, and has worked at Bedwell for the last 9. 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.
• Share stories, pictures, postcards and mementos from seaside trips in the past. What things did you do at the seaside? Why did you go to that particular place? If you’ve been to the seaside in different countries, think about what is similar and different about all these places.
• We will be learning about the properties of materials and the reasons why different things are made from different materials, so try going on a materials hunt when you’re out and about - how many things can we spot that are made from plastic? Why do you think they chose to use that material? What other material could be used instead?

Our latest news:

• 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. 
 

 
• Our history topic has seen us learning about the Great Fire of London. As part of this unit, we compared firefighting in the past with firefighting in the present day, and were invited to Stevenage Firestation to meet a team of firefighters. The best part of the day was when we climbed up into the fire engine and got to use the hose!
 

 
• We had a fantastic visit to see Goldilocks in Milton Keynes on the 10th December. It was a great day out and we all loved getting to join in with the show by laughing, singing and booing. We were especially excited when two children from our school were invited on stage to sing the final song with the star, Brian Conley! 
 

 
• We have enjoyed practising and getting ready for our performance of Knock Knock. We loved learning the songs, actions and words, and loved performing the finished show. Thank you to everyone who came to watch us. 
 

We have been learning about... 

Maths - We started the term learning about graphs and money. We used scales to weigh small objects in grams. Then we learned to tell the time using our special TOothPASTe method! This helped us to realise whether the time was quarter-to or quarter-past the hour. At the end of the term we have been learning how to double and halve two-digit numbers, developing useful strategies to help us to do this accurately.

English - In the first half of term, we enjoyed reading the story of Little Red. We created sections of speech and acted out the story with homemade puppets. We then turned our own stories into little books for Little Red’s next adventure! After that, we read and learnt all about turtles. We have found it fascinating learning facts about them and turning these into statements with a conjunction. We then used our knowledge to write up our own reports.

This term's topics

English - Our next English topic is built around the story Traction Man, by Mini Grey. We will begin by exploring the text, writing questions to the author, summarising the plot in our own words and drawing labelled diagrams of the heroes and villains. We will develop our use of descriptive writing by drafting our own character descriptions, before writing superhero stories of our own. After that, our final topic of the year will look at poetry. We will focus on the Belonging Street Poems by Mandy Coe, looking at the poet’s language and punctuation choices, and then using these to inspire our own work. Once we have written and edited our own poems, we will finish by recording them for a class audio collection.

Maths - In Dormice, we will be focussing on multiplication and division. We will do lots of practical grouping in order to make links between multiplication and repeated addition (4 x 5 is the same as 5 + 5 + 5 + 5) and between division and sharing. We will then finish off by learning to tell the time to the nearest half-hour.

Science - We will continue to investigate the properties of different materials, sorting them in a variety of ways and designing our own tests to find out how suitable they are for different jobs. We will think about the reasons why certain materials are used for specific purposes and suggest suitable alternatives that could be used for everyday tasks.

Humanities - In our geography lessons, we will be learning about seaside environments. We will discuss what people do when they go on seaside holidays and learn about natural and man-made features that we find in these places. We will then choose a specific seaside resort to investigate further (selected based on our own experiences) and compare this town with life in Stevenage. In history, meanwhile, we will explore seaside holidays from the past and discover how they have changed over the years. We will use photos, video clips and first-hand accounts to support our learning, and will use all of this to discuss how seaside environments have changed.

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