Welcome to Rabbit class! Our teacher is Mrs Wren, who has been teaching at Bedwell for three 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, Ola and Darcie

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. 
• Talk about the food you eat and the effect that it has on your bodies. Have a look at the nutritional information on the side of food packets and find foods that are high in fibre, protein or carbohydrates.
• Catch-up on some of the fab nature documentaries available on the BBC iplayer, looking at the range of things that different animals eat.
• If you’re up for a day out, there are lots of local Roman sites and museums to visit - Welwyn Roman Baths, St Albans Hypocaust, Verulamium Museum and the British Museum all have lots of artefacts and remains to help bring history to life. A good place to start is www.stalbansmuseums.org.uk.
• 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:

• We’ve continued to pack in lots of parent and carer workshops throughout the term, sharing our learning, celebrating successes and giving ideas for supporting children at home. In Year 3/4 we ran a brilliant Stay & Make focussing on Anglo Saxon art, where each family created a brooch from clay and gemstones. An amazing 82 family members attended (sending staff off to round up every available table in the school), and it was great to see whole families working together to create pieces of art and sharing what they had made. Thank you to everyone who made it along.
 

 
• On Thursday 5th June, Years 3 and 4 headed to the Natural History Museum in Tring on what turned out to be a very rainy day. After we got settled, we spent the morning exploring the many galleries and exhibits before heading into a workshop on animal classification (which has been our science topic this term). We broke into groups and were given five different skeletons to investigate and identify. We loved exploring the museum, and many of us couldn’t believe how big some of the animals are in real life!
 

 
• The whole school got involved in this year’s Sports Week, which took place from 16th - 20th June. Across a packed week, we took part in three Sports Days, a huge range of taster sessions and lots of fantastic events run by local clubs and sporting organisations, as well as our brilliant Sports Days. You can find out more about what we got up to here.    
 

 
• To support our history topic, we visited Milton Keynes theatre to watch Horrible Histories: Awful Egyptians. As well as being educational, the show also brought everything to life. We watched a body be mummified, learnt about the life of Rameses II, found out why the Gods were so important, and much more.
 

 
• Our Year 3/4 sports teams have done really well this term, with gold medals for both our Girls and Boys Indoor Athletics teams and a silver for our Rapid Fire Cricket team (pictured below). Over 25 of us have also played football for school this term, including 15 of us who took part in the Stevenage Schools Year 3/4 Girls Football Festival. 
 

 
• We thoroughly enjoyed getting involved in this year’s Science Week. A particular highlight was our session with the visiting planetarium, where we learnt about the solar system, stars and planets in a huge inflatable dome. We also had great fun completing this year’s Knex challenge, where we had to build a protective helmet, and our annual Egg Drop competition, where we worked in pairs to build a contraption capable of safely transporting an egg from the classroom roof to the ground below.
 

We have been learning about... 

History - Our topic this term has been the Ancient Egyptians, and we have loved learning about their world - especially the messy facts about how they made their mummies! We have also explored their Gods, clothes, food and lifestyle, and have begun to investigate the way that they used hieroglyphics.

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

Art - This term’s objective was to develop our shading skills, and we cleverly combined this with our work on tornados to create some colourful 3D twisters. Initially we used pen and coloured pencils, but eventually some of us moved onto creating shades with oil pastel.

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 - Our next science topic will see us focussing on healthy bodies, finding out what sort of foods our bodies need to stay healthy. We will be exploring the way that our muscles and skeletons work and comparing the diets of different animals. We will also be contrasting the bodies of animals with and without skeletons, investigating the way they move, eat and protect themselves.

Humanities - We will continue to explore what happened when the Romans invaded Britain and the way in which it changed life in our country. We will be looking at the reasons why the Romans were so powerful and some of the leaders who helped to grow their Empire. We will be making our own timelines and identifying what still remains of Roman Britain. Throughout the topic, we will be looking at a range of artefacts, ruins and historical sources to help us to think like an historian.

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