Welcome to Fieldmouse class! Our teacher is Mrs Devenish, who has been teaching at Bedwell for 16 years and loves making our lessons as creative as possible. Her favourite things are cooking and being outdoors, although she doesn’t like snow very much, and is scared of spiders.

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

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 all had great fun on our India Day. We took part in a variety of Indian workshops including dancing, writing our names in Hindi, playing cricket, creating mehndi hand designs and cooking chapattis. We finished the day by sampling our cooking with a variety of dips.
 

 
• We were delighted that so many of our parents and carers were able to join us for our Stay and Count sessions earlier in the term.    
 

 
• We had a fantastic visit to see Goldilocks at Milton Keynes Theatre. It was a great opportunity for us to watch a real production after completing our own show, and we quickly knew when we needed to laugh, clap or boo! It also linked beautifully to our English unit so we could add even more detail to our writing about Goldilocks. 
 

 
• We have enjoyed attending Forest School. We have had great fun exploring the forest, engaging in different activities and making our own snack. We particularly liked making log dogs, making magical wands, drinking hot chocolate and playing games at the end of each session.
 

 

We have been learning about... 

Maths - We have been learning about 2d and 3d shapes and their properties, as well as exploring measures, the days of the week and months of the year. We really enjoyed sharing lots of our learning with you at our Stay and Count session.

English - This term we have been reading Stanley’s Sticks, Ruby’s Worry and Madlenka. We learnt how to plan and write our own stories about our stick, recount roars or worries we may have had and wrote our own journey tales. We particularly enjoyed getting to share our finished books with children in Nursery. We have also worked on using ? and ! correctly, as well as using conjunctions to extend sentences.

This term's topics

English - Our next writing unit is based around the story Little Red and the Very Hungry Lion, by Alex T Smith. We will be using this text to explore the idea of ‘twists’, adding new ingredients to traditional stories, while also developing our use of question marks and exclamation marks. We will then use these skills to write our own ‘tales with a twist’. After that, we will be switching to non-fiction, this time using The Big Book of Bugs by Yuval Zommer as our core text. We will work on our use of adjectives and verbs to describe bugs in detail, as well as investigating the way the book is organised. We will then work together to create entries for a brand new class book, explaining the life-cycle of imaginary creatures.

Maths - Multiplication and division will be our main focus for the next few weeks. We will explore multiplication, using grouping, repeated addition and arrays to properly understand what this ‘means’ - for instance, understanding that 4 x 5 means four groups of 5, or 5 lots of 4, or 5 + 5 + 5 + 5. We will use these skills to solve multiplication problems, and will then use the same approach to get to grips with division, exploring sharing and equal grouping practically. After all that, we will switch our attention to time, looking at analogue clocks, understanding what each hand shows and using the language of o’clock and half-past to tell the time to the nearest 30 minutes.

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.