Welcome to Rabbit class! Our teacher is Mrs Wren, who has been teaching at Bedwell for four years. She is really good at music and English, and wants to make her lessons fun, interactive and memorable.  

• Our curriculum map - find out about our current topics
• Our latest school newsletter
• Meet our School Councillors, Phoebe and Dawson

Home learning ideas:

• We’re working on tables facts this term, so it would be brilliant if you could work on learning these at home. Focus on one table at a time and try: 
  • Making-up rhymes to help remember number facts (“4 x 6 is 24, bears growl and lions roar!”)
  • Looking for numbers in that table in the world around you - on doors, car number plates, in phone numbers or when you’re out shopping.
  • Writing-out tables with finger paints, chalk or water-on-tarmac, or make them from playdoh.
  • Chanting, singing, whispering... Say tables out loud together whenever you have the chance.
• Each week we are set spellings to learn. Click here for guidance on strategies you can use to support your child in learning these at home. 
• We’re learning about volcanoes, earthquakes, floods and hurricanes, so if anyone in the family has first-hand experiences of these (that aren’t too scary), they would be great to share. Otherwise, see what you can find out about one of these natural disasters - the BBC Bitesize site has some great videos and animations here. 
• If you’re visiting London anytime soon, the Natural History Museum has a whole section devoted to volcanoes and earthquakes - you can find out more about visiting at www.nhm.ac.uk
• Sort things in the home into solids, liquids and gases. Some are easy (bricks are definitely solid) but some, like sugar or sand, will need a bit more thought. Why are these solids? If you can find something you can’t sort, bring it into class! There are resources to support our science topic available on BBC Bitesize at: www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zgwc96f  
• There’s some great advice on talking to children about online safety on the NSPCC website at www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/ We also use lots of resources from the UK Safer Internet Centre: saferinternet.org.uk/ 

Our latest news:

• At the start of June, Years 3 and 4 visited Celtic Harmony Camp in Hertford to support our history topic, which has focussed on life in Ancient Britain. We took part in a series of activities that helped us to understand what life was like in the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, building shelters, making bread, shaping tools, moulding pots and exploring the woodlands. We had a great day out and it really helped to bring the past to life!
 

 
• We organised a fantastic French Café, which saw the Infant Hall packed with families ordering pastries and drinks en français and putting all of the French we have learnt this year to good use.
 

 
• We loved getting involved in this year's Sports Week, which included skateboarding, rugby, netball, athletics and our massive Sports Day. We threw ourselves into every session with great enthusiasm, and discovered lots of new passions! 
 

 
• We rounded-off our geography topic with a brilliant USA Day. We all came to school dressed in red, white and blue (to represent the American flag), and then took part in art, cooking and PE sessions. We especially enjoyed making (and eating) our apple pies!
 
• This term, we have had the chance to take part in Fit Kidz activities as part of our weekly PE sessions. With lots of weights and fitness activities, they are a great way for us to build up our core strength and stamina - and it’s been lots of fun too! 
 

 
• As part of our history topic on Roman Britain, we made our own Roman shields. We cut out cardboard for the base of our shields and then added card shapes and patterns to make them look as authentic as possible. We finished the project by marching out onto the field in a classic Roman ‘tortoise’ formation! 
 

 
• We were delighted to be joined by so many of our parents and carers for our Stay and Read event. We talked about the reasons why reading regularly at home is so important, explored some of the things we can do to make it an enjoyable experience and shared lots of our favourite books. A big thank you to everyone who made time to join us in class. 
 

We have been learning about... 

Science - As part of our work on plants we carried out investigations to discover what they need to survive. We tried growing them in the dark, with no water or sealed in plastic bags (to give them no air). We recorded our observations carefully and used these to draw conclusions about the conditions needed for seeds to germinate and grow.   

English - We have covered lots of different types of writing this term, including personal narratives, calligram poems, character descriptions and dialogue. We particularly enjoyed our work on persuasion, exploring posters and persuasive letter writing techniques before drawing together all of our knowledge to write speeches, trying to convince our teachers that we should cut down on the amount of paper that we use.

Do you think that we should be cutting down trees? Did you know that we have spent £6000 on photocopying in a year? You know that paper is made from trees. If we keep cutting down trees there will not be anything left! 

Do you believe that cutting down tree is important? You are destroying the happy trees. You are never too small to make a decision. You should consider using online work. We could do online homework. Do you want to harm the poor animals? In class we could use whiteboards. Please do the right thing and make this change. 

By Sadaqat

This term's topics

English - Our next topic will see us exploring fables, using a fantastic story called The Lion Inside by Rachel Bright as our starting point. We will begin by identifying the ingredients of fable stories - usually set in the natural world, with animal characters and a central moral message. After that, we will investigate the use of more complex sentence structures (using conjunctions like if, because and although to tie ideas together), along with the use of commas to separate items in a list. We will finish-off this unit by writing fables of our own. Throughout the term we will continue to develop our spelling knowledge, adding a range of different suffixes and prefixes to root words. 

Maths - We will start the half-term by getting to grips with written (column) strategies for addition and subtraction, building up to being able to add or subtract any pair of 3-digit numbers. We will then use these to solve word problems. After that, we’ll be moving on to looking at graphs and tables, creating our own bar charts and using these to answer questions. Following that, we move onto lines, angles and shapes, identifying right angles and putting angles into size order. Finally we will learn to identify parallel, perpendicular, vertical and horizontal lines and search for these in the world around us.

Science - We will be exploring ‘states of matter’, working out what the difference is between solids, liquids and gases and comparing the way that materials move and behave in each state. We will do lots of sorting and grouping, and will carry out experiments to see how we can change materials from one state to another through heating and cooling.

Humanities - We will continue to investigate volcanoes, tsunamis, earthquakes and other natural disasters. We will be looking at the impact these disasters have had on environments around the world, and exploring the ways in which people who live in areas where earthquakes and tsunamis are common, protect themselves against these events. We will also begin to investigate the reasons why these disasters happen - and to do that, we will need to find out more about the way the Earth is structured and the forces that move chunks of it around.

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