Our English work has taken a big step-up this half-term, with us exploring longer texts and thinking much more carefully about the style of our writing.  We have enjoyed reading and basing our writing on the following texts so far.

Our History topic has been a massive hit with all the children and you might have heard your fair share of facts about the Great Fire of London! The children were really able to impress with the recall of the key facts when we had our visitor from the fire service this week.  Brown Bear's were able to talk about fire safety in a very responsible way and identified all the things that we now have in place to reduce the chances of another great fire. The BBC website has some great videos, games and information that the children have loved researching and they have also been able to find some other great websites using the child-friendly search engine 'swiggle'.

In Maths, we have been continuing to work on different strategies that we can use to add and subtract one and two-digit numbers from each other.  We have added counting in 3s to our multiplication facts and have reinforced the division facts for 2s, 5s and 10s.  It has taken some time but we are now more confident with creating a family facts for each times table, understanding which number to start with when we create the two division calculations. 

Book week was a real success in Brown Bears and the children made some incredible Book Worm Book Reviews that we hope to display soon of their favourite books, so please watch this space!  We had a long talk about the values and expectations we have in school after I had to be a little creative with the truth when I tried to trick the class during the Masked Reader.  We also loved working with Liz Avery and writing our own postcards from a different planet which is yet to be discovered.