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.

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 on the last day of term.  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.

DT was our focus for this half-term and the children really enjoyed making boxes for a precious item.  Despite the boxes not quite being strong enough to store Samuel Pepys' cheese and wine, the children worked hard to reinforce their boxes and secure them in different ways.  The children took time to explore whether velcro, tying or creating a lock system would be best for their box.  Those that chose Velcro even worked out how to solve the problem of the velcro being so secure that it even ripped the cardboard!

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.

We are very much looking forward to the Summer Term, when swimming lessons begin.  Hopefully all our hard work getting changed for PE in under 5 minutes will help us out at the pool!  However, will everything be named clearly enough for all children to end up with their own clothes at the end.  Thank you in advance to all parents who are willing and able to sign up for a volunteer slot to help us with this.