Week 6 – w/c 25th March
How can it be Easter already? What a busy and exciting half term we have had in Year 2! We hope you have enjoyed seeing just how much your children have been doing. Don’t forget to ask them all about their learning.
Congratulations to our Year 2 Stars of the Week! We are so proud of you all.
English
Our learning journey this past fortnight has been based on the book Tell me a Dragon. We’ve had a fabulous time using our amazing imaginations to describe our own dragons. We’ve thought about things such as personality, looks, where they lived and what their super power might be. This week we planned, wrote, edited and published our dragon descriptions. We used expanded noun phrases and consolidated our use of subordinating and coordinating conjunctions to make our sentences more interesting.
Maths
We have continued our division learning this week. We have also been introduced to the fraction, half ( ½ ).
DT
We were very excited to make our healthy snacks this week. We used our designs to help us choose vegetables, dips and breads. We then used the claw or bridge method to safely chop the vegetables and breads into our desired shapes. Sadly, the weather did not allow us to eat our picnic outside, so we had a class carpet picnic instead!
PE
Easter fun!
Today (last day of term), we’ve enjoyed an Easter egg hunt around the school and loved making Easter cards and doing Easter crafts. We have also enjoyed singing Easter songs. Do ask us to sing the ‘Spring Chicken’ song; It’s a firm favourite in Year 2!
All the staff in Year 2 would like to wish our children and their families a very happy Easter. Have a wonderful holiday and we look forward to seeing you in two weeks!
Week 5 – w/c 18th March
Wow! What another exciting and busy week we have had this week!
Huge congratulations to our stars of the week for impressing us with their hard work this week – We are very proud!
We started this week off with some more learning about our favourite history topic – The Titanic! We have spent time discussing and understanding the many different reasons that caused so many people to lose their lives and how much of an impact these factors had on the tragedy!
In Music we have been continuing our ‘Jolly Rogers’ lesson from last week, developing our graphic notation for our class storm piece and then practising our performances of it!
In Maths we have now moved on to our new topic of division! We have done lots of practical work this week, learning to divide objects into equal groups of 2s, 5s and 10s.
We then reached one of the most exciting days this week, Science day! We spent the day conducting multiple different experiments linking to our materials topic as well as the Science Week 2024 theme of ‘Time’. We were also very lucky to have a workshop with Dr Geary who showed us some very interesting experiments that had us all working and thinking as scientists!
We then had another fantastic couple of days on Thursday and Friday with a special visit from the author Andy Seed! We were very lucky to have a workshop with Andy, learning a poem and getting to ask lots of questions about his books and what it’s like being an author. Each Year 2 class gifted him a book of animal interviews that we had written which we are really proud of.
To round off our very busy week, we took part in ‘Rock your socks’ on World Down Syndrome day to raise money and awareness for Portsmouth Down Syndrome Association. We had lots of fun celebrating our uniqueness as individuals and also showing off our bright and colourful socks!
Week 4 – w/c 11th March
Here are the new Stars of the Week! We are so proud of you!
In Maths this week we have been learning about money! We have looked at the value of different coins and adding coins together to work out how much money we have. Knowing our 2s, 5s and 10s times tables has been a really useful skill to help us do this. Why don’t you challenge us to tell you the answers to these tables!
In English we have created final pieces of writing inspired by the Andy Seed book ‘Interview with a Bengal Tiger and Other Clawed Beasts Too’. We are looking forward to meeting him next week!
After tasting different vegetables, as part of our Design and Technology topic, we have been learning how to prepare these for eating. We have learnt how to use different utensils and practised skills like cutting and peeling. We also learnt about the importance of washing both our hands and the food to ensure all mud and germs are removed.
In History we considered the reasons why the Titanic sunk and put them in order.
In Music we worked in groups to create a storm themed graphic notation. We then chose the best graphic notations and created a class picture. We then chose sounds for each item on the picture. Next week, we look forward to performing the class storm graphic notation. One of us will act as conductor by moving a beater slowly across the graphics so the rest of the class knows when it is their turn to play.
In P.E. we carried on thinking about co-ordination and counter balance. Some of us challenged ourselves to the tricky challenge of balancing with our eyes closed!
Week 3 – w/c 4th March
What a fun filled, exciting and busy week we’ve had! Where do we start?
Congratulations to our Stars of the Week – we are very proud of you!
In preparation for our Year 2 snack pot picnic, we had to try some different vegetables to decide which ones we would like to choose for our final product. We tasted cucumber, pepper, celery, broccoli and radish. We also learned about how these vegetables grow and thought of different adjectives to describe how they look, feel, smell and taste.
Our trip to the Titanic Museum on Tuesday was brilliant. We learned even more exciting facts about the Titanic and participated in lots of activities. Some of which included finding out about the roles of different crew members, undertaking an experiment, looking at artefacts, reading letters from people on board the ship, listening to people’s stories of their experiences, seeing what a second-class cabin would have looked like and pretending we were the firefighters loading coal into the boilers.
On Wednesday we had another visit from Harold the giraffe who shares a big part in our PSHE curriculum. We talked about all the things our body needs to keep us alive. We learned about different parts of our body and even saw what the inside of our body looks like through an incredible app! We talked about different feelings and emotions and helped Harold solve some friendship issues whilst he was at his party. We had such fun seeing Harold again and giving him a scratch under his chin!
On Thursday we celebrated World Book Day. What a blast it was! In the morning, each class was given a mission to decorate their classroom doors with the theme of a book. We brainstormed ideas of different stories that we could choose and then had a class vote to decide. We soon got to work and created some fantastic masterpieces! In the afternoon, we enjoyed viewing all of the Books in Boxes in the hall. There were lots to look at, they were all amazing and so unique. The teachers were extremely proud of us for working so hard!
Week 2 – w/c 26th February
Congratulations to our Stars of the Week – You have really impressed us with your hard work!
This week in English we have continued with our learning journey of ‘An Interview with a Bengal Tiger and Other Clawed Beasts’. We have been practising writing some questions and answers in the style of Andy Seed for our own animals. We have also been focusing on adding coordinating and subordinating conjunctions within these.
This week in Maths we have been practising our recall of our 2, 5 and 10 times tables. Becoming more fluent in these will help us with more advanced problems in our future mathematical learning! We also enjoyed the challenge of applying our timetables facts to some reasoning and problem solving questions.
Computing this week has been all about creating pictograms to display different information. We have worked in pairs to collect data about our classes favourite things and then we used this data to make pictograms so that we could easily see the answers from our group.
A storm came brewing in the Music & Drama room this week when our musical pirates learned a chant, continuing our Jolly Rogers topic. We learned that chants include a narrative and rhyming couplets. We then came up with creative ways to perform the chant, keeping the steady beat all the way through.
In PE this week, we have been developing our ball skills further. We have been practising moving smoothly and fluently whilst keeping control of the ball and have gradually started to increase our speed with this too!
In PSHE we identified special people in the school and community who can help us to keep them safe. We learnt that in an emergency the number to ring is 999. We found out that 999 is the number to call if someone needs the police, the fire service or an ambulance. We then acted out how to ask for help. We thought about the following:
- How to get someone’s attention (Excuse me!, Hello Mr/Mrs/Miss)
- Asking that person for help (Can you help me please?)
- Explaining why we need help (my ball has landed on the roof and I can’t get it down/ I’ve lost my mum, I last saw her by the green jumpers).
Did you know each class is working towards a team goal? – to collect class dojo points to gain a treat once they hit their class target. Points are awarded for things such as being kind and respectful, showing compassion, looking, listening and learning, persevering with a task, working hard, staying on task, teamwork, participating in lessons. Today (1.3.24) Puffins and Woodpeckers were so pleased to have their treat today as they both reached their goals earlier this week. Woodpeckers chose to have Golden Time and Puffins watched a film with a cookie!
Week 1 – w/c 19th February
Welcome back to what will be another busy and exciting half term in Year 2!
Congratulations to our Year 2 Stars of the Week! We are so proud of you all.
We started a new learning journey in English this week. Our new book is ‘An Interview with a Bengal Tiger and Other Clawed Beasts’. We are so excited that Andy Seed, the author of this book, will be visiting us in school in a few weeks! This week we have immersed ourselves into the text by matching questions to the correct animal. We also did some echo-reading of the questions and answers which helped our prosody and fluency. We then did a little drama to further practise interview technique. We had to think about our variety of tone we used when we were playing the animal. This depended on the personality of the animal who was answering the questions.
This week in Maths, we continued with multiplication. We were focussing on the fact that multiplication is commutative. This means that when two numbers are multiplied, this can be done in any order and the same answer will be obtained. We used arrays to help us.
Did you know that by the end of Year 2, we need to be able to recall all of our 2, 5 and 10 times tables? Please help us practise at home.
We were all super excited to start our History topic this week. Through a slow reveal picture we learned that our new topic was on …. The Titanic! We looked closely at an artists impression of it sinking and labelled what we could see. We spotted the iceberg, people in the freezing cold water, people in rowing boats (lifeboats), people being rescued, people still on the sinking ship, smoke from the funnels, the sinking liner.
Our new Music topic is titled The Jolly Rogers, and it’s all about pirates! We learnt two songs. The first was ‘Ten Lazy Pirates’ (sung to the tune of Ten Green Bottles). This was fun because the teachers chose ten children to pretend to be the lazy pirates. Our second song was ‘What Shall we do with a Lazy Pirate?’ (sung to the tune of ‘What Shall we do with a Drunken Sailor?’). We learnt that this song has a chorus and verses, unlike the first one. We came up with our own ideas on how to punish a lazy pirate and then made up two new verses to sing.
In Real PE this half term we will be developing and applying ball skills and counter balance. In this lesson, we tried to maintain control of a ball whilst moving it.
We are learning about the Christian Easter story in RE this term. This week we were thinking about something in our lives that has made us feel sad but then something happens to make us happy. For example, we feel sad when we fall over and hurt ourselves, but we feel happy when a friend helps us up and comforts us. We also listened to music and determined whether we thought it was sad music (Adagio for Strings) or happy music (Happy by Pharrell Williams). Can you tell from the pictures which type of music we were listening to?
