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.
• Try to learn where things are in the world on maps or globes. Can your child find and name all of the world’s continents and oceans? Can they find the UK and any other countries that are important to your family on a map?
• Explore some of our local habitats and see what different living things you can find there - what differences can you see between the park, woodland, back gardens and farmers fields? What things do the animals that live in these places eat? How do they keep themselves safe? Which of them would be happy living in your garden?

Our latest news:

• We have enjoyed practising and getting ready for our performance of Knock Knock. We loved learning the songs, actions and words, and loved performing the finished show. Thank you to everyone who came to watch us. 
 

 
• 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 working on our understanding of number to 10 and finding different ways to make a number. We explored our number bonds to 10 and have begun to use this knowledge to find number bonds to 20. We have also explored how we can write simple number sentences and then switch these around to find corresponding fact families.

English - This term we have been reading Gruffalo Crumble. We learnt how to follow instructions and enjoyed making different recipes. We learnt how to structure and write instructions and used these to create a Gruffalo party. We have also started to look at traditional tales. So far, we have looked at The 3 Billy Goats Gruff, The Princess and the Pea and Goldilocks and the 3 Bears. We have retold the stories through drama and puppets; we focussed on their sentences structure and using adjectives to describe characters and settings. We have also focussed on the repetitive story language in each story.

This term's topics

English - Our next writing topic is built around the story Madlenka, by Peter Sis. In this fantastic picture book, Madlenka travels around New York, and everyone she meets shares their memories of the places in the world they have moved from. We will use the book to help us to develop our use of ‘and’ to link ideas, as well as exclamation marks to show surprise. We will finish the unit by writing a short story based on our own memories. After that, we will move on to explore poetry, using Julia Donaldson’s Poems to Perform as our core text. We will read, listen to and perform a range of poems, exploring the use of rhyme and rhythm. We will then use these pieces to inspire our own writing.

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 be continuing to explore living things and their habitats. We will identify differences between things that are living, dead or have never been alive, and learn about the key features that all living things share. We will explore the places where particular animals live, and think about the ways in which these are linked to their characteristics.

Humanities - We will be learning all about what life is like for a child who is growing up in the small Indian village of Chembakolli. We will look at the weather in the village, daily life, the local environment and the food that is grown and eaten there. This will lead us to consider how life in the village of Chembakolli is different to our way of living in Stevenage, and whether there are similarities too.

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