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, Eve and Tommy

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.
• We’re learning about the way 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? If you’re visiting grandparents or other (older) relatives before Christmas, compare each generation’s experiences - what’s changed and what has stayed the same?
• 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 will begin the new half-term by exploring instructions. We will learn about the way that these texts are organised, using ‘you will need’ lists, numbered steps and time order, using a recipe for Gruffalo Crumble as our inspiration. We will then write our own recipes for imaginary foods. After that, we will focus on fairy stories, thinking about the way that different characters feel and the way in which they are described. This will lead to us writing our versions of stories that we know well. Throughout the term, we will continue to develop our spelling and phonics every day in our Read Write Inc sessions.

Maths - Our maths for the half-term will focus on learning our number bonds to 10, recognising all the different pairs of numbers we can add together to make 10. To help us find and learn these facts, we will be learning to use part-part-whole models, tens frames and bead strings to represent calculations in different ways. We will also begin to record these facts as number sentences. Once we have identified and learnt our bonds to ten, we will then use these skills to solve simple problems linked to our topic and learning in other areas. We will also continue to work on splitting numbers between 10 and 20 into ‘10 and some more’, as well as recognising the difference between odd and even numbers.

Science - We will continue to explore the four seasons that make up our year, identifying the way that our environment changes as we move from autumn to winter. We will head outside to collect evidence of these changes, and record our observations. We will also investigate the ways in which different animals prepare for the colder weather.

Humanities - We will continue to explore the idea of change over time, recognising that the world around us does not stay the same and that the lives we live now are different to those experienced by our parents and grandparents when they were our age. We will be focussing in particular on the way that our town has changed, looking at older photos and maps of Stevenage and using these resources to investigate the way that it has changed over the last 100 years.

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