Welcome to Fieldmouse class! Our teacher is Mrs Devenish, who has been teaching at Bedwell for 18 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.
• 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 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 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 money and the value of coins this term. We have also learnt about halves and quarters, and then used this knowledge to find half and quarter of an amount, shape or turn. We have also explored time and are getting very good at telling the time to the nearest half-hour.

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 - We’re starting with Jasper’s Beanstalk, a story we already know well from Early Years. We will be learning, retelling and mapping out the story, and then exploring the way that authors sequence stories. We will also be exploring the way that labels are used to help us recognise things and understand what we read. After that, we will use what we have read to help us write a set of instructions for planting a bulb, focussing in particular on writing in complete sentences that include capital letters, full stops and finger spaces. 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 maths for the half-term will focus on securing our understanding of numbers to 10 - ordering, counting, comparing and estimating with these numbers, so that we have a really solid platform to build on as we move through the year. To help us develop these skills, we will be learning to use part-part-whole models, tens frames and bead strings to represent numbers in different ways. We will also begin to record addition and subtraction facts as number sentences. This half-term we will also be exploring positional language, using phrases like on top, underneath, below, behind, in front, next to, left and right. We will also talk about whole, half and quarter turns.

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.