Welcome to Year 2!
Teaching Team:
- Classroom Teacher: Miss Palmer
- Teaching Assistants: Mrs Fowler
- PPA Cover: Mrs Bane (Tuesday mornings) Mrs Watkis (Tuesday afternoon)
Welcome to year 2!
Our PE days are Tuesday and Wednesday- please come to school dressed in your PE kit. Monday's are Muddy Mondays in the forest school area so please bring your wellies and come dressed appropriately!
Books are changed on Fridays :)
Visits and Wandlebury trip- Summer 1
We have had a very exciting few weeks in year two! On our first week back after half term we had a chocolate making workshop from 'Artistry in cocoa' and learnt all about the history of chocolate, had a chocolate making demonstration, learnt how to taste chocolate professionally and made our own chocolate lollies!
On Monday 22nd April we had a fantastic time on our trip to Wandlebury focusing on science and nature. We learnt all about plants and animals and their habitats and got to do so many exiting activities!
On 30th April we were really lucky because 'Those History People' came to visit us for our Faerie Tale Castle Workshop as part of our Fairy Tale Topic. In the morning we had lots of jobs to do in the castle (pictures to come) and in the afternoon we had a medieval banquet!
Week one of Spring 2:
We have had a fantastic first week back after half term. The children have been so busy learning about our new topic of chocolate! Some of our learning this week has included:
- In design and technology this week we have been thinking about the chocolate bars that we are going to be making next week. The first stage of our design process was evaluating we tasted a range of different chocolates, rated their taste and wrappers and thought about what we liked about them and why. We then thought of three innovated flavours and went to different classes to conduct surveys before designing our bars and wrappers.
- In history we started to learn about the origins of the cocoa bean, we read a story about this and then worked in small groups to illustrate a part of the story each with chalk on the playground.
- In literacy we started to write about charlie and the chocolate factory. This included tasting more chocolate and creating our own innovative chocolate bar names using a mix of amazing adjectives for Mr Willy Wonker.
- In math's we continued our unit of multiplication and division and explored this in a range of different ways.
- In PSHE we thought about our star qualities, working as a team and the importance of listening to each other and did lots of fun listening challenges and games.
- Reading challenge- Some golden tickets have been hidden in the books in our book corner, we have been reading lots in activity time to try and find them and three children have already!
Rainbow day! 16th February 2024
We spent the last day of half term celebrating how everyone in our class and their families are different, unique and special.
We came into school dressed in rainbow colours and started our day reading a story about how everyone is different and amazing we then got a potato each in groups and looked at how each potato was different and made up our own stories about the potato and performed them to the class, they were very creative!
After performing our performance poems to year 1 we read and talked about the story 'A Handful of Buttons' which is a story about family diversity we made bracelets with different buttons for different people in our families and thought about how each family is different but are connected by an invisible string of love.
During activity time we had great fun being scientists making rainbow slime and decorating biscuits with portraits of ourselves!
In the afternoon we became scientists again and worked in groups to think about how we could use newspaper to build the tallest towers!
Well done to the children for being such brave, enthusiastic learners this half term!
Super scientists- spring 1
We love science in year 2 and have been working really hard on our science in lessons and in our learning through play at activity time. Some of the things we have been doing this half term have been:
- Making our own slime and playdough
- Using bottles to make paper mice we made fly
- The magnet maize bottle experiment
- Mission survive explorify challenges- we learnt about mars and worked in teams to create creatures and homes and humans and our made up creatures could survive in on mars.
- Pretending to be humans stranded in the forest during muddy Monday's and thinking about how we could survive and what humans need to survive.
- We did a challenge where we had to use only newspaper to make the tallest towers we could and thought about how to make them stand up
Muddy Mondays spring 1:
We have had lots of fun outdoors during Muddy Mondays this half term and look forward to having more fun outdoors after half term. Thank you so much to the amazing grown-ups who have supported these sessions!
Performance poets: Week 6 and 7 Spring 1:
We have been learning all about poetry and performance poetry, over the past two weeks we have been writing our own poems and performing them. We even performed them to year 1 on the last day of the half term!
Well done to all our brilliant year 2 poets!
Let's Go to China: Our topic this half term has been 'All about China', we have exploring our topic across our learning this half term.
Some of our learning has included:
- Learning about ancient China and Chinese landscapes in our Literacy lessons and writing about the story- 'The Magic Paintbrush'.
- 'Chinese New Year Day'- we celebrated chinese new year in our class with a topic day. We came into school dressed in red and took part in a range of activities including chinese dragon dancing, lantern making, making spring rolls and eating them with chopsticks and writing chinese numerals in sand
- Thank you so much to Amber's Great-Grandfather Mr Kwan for visiting us and telling us about how chinese New Year is celebrated in China!
- We had a chinese ceremonial tea party
- We made models of the Great Wall of China and measured them after learning about Beijing
- We learnt about school in china and did presentations about how our school is similar and different to a primary school in China
- We learnt some Mandarin and showed our learning to the school and grown-ups in assembly
- We used the laptops to research about China and made our own fact books
Thank you so much to parents and carers who have been coming in to share their languages with the children. We have had so much fun !
Week 10:
The children have done a fantastic job this week!
Some of our learning has included:
Our village walk to look at human and physical features- thank you so much to the grown-ups that helped!
Math's- subtracting two digit numbers
We made dens on Muddy Monday and drank hot chocolate in them
We started our new writing unit about George and the Dragon!
We practiced sewing!
Week 8
We had a great week back after half term starting our new heroes and heroines topic! We were very lucky to have a parent come in to talk to us about their job as a doctor- Thank you so much! We were also very lucky because we had a police officer visit us to tell us about the work the police do, he even showed us his police car!
Some of our learning this week has included:
Learning different methods we can use to add and subtract, including adding three one-digit numbers. We did practical activities to practice this and wrote our own math's stories too!
We carried on with our biography writing unit on Grace Darling.
We did lots of handwriting practice.
We learnt about different heroines including Agent Fifi, Emmeline Pankhurst and Amelia Earhart.
We did a science experiment where we grew our own rainbows!
We started using our sketch books and did drawings of the natural world and did poetry doodling!
Well done to the amazing year two's for a fantastic first half term! We had a lovely week finishing our great fire of London topic. Some of our learning this week has been:
Our firefighter visit ! We used different fire fighting tools like fire hooks, water squirters and hoses to put out the fire in Thomas Farriner's bakery.
Great fire of London day! We worked as young Londoner's working in 1666. We baked cakes from Samuel Pepy's diary that Thomas Farriner used to bake for the King, worked as 1666 seamstresses and did our own sewing, designed and made new fire fighting tools to put out the 1666 and made scent bags because in 1666 they had no soap!
We started our topic on heroes and heroines, writing biographies about Grace Darling. We can't wait to learn more about heroes and heroines after half term.
We made tudor houses and burnt them to see how the fire spread in 1666!
Week 6:
The children have done a fantastic job again this week! Some of our learning this week has been:
We did some baking last Friday because the class got ten pom poms for achieving their class targets!
We finished our diary writing unit on the great fire of London and started learning about Grace Darling and biography writing. We had lots of fun doing some Grace Darling drama!
We did our rainbow challenges and started making Tudor houses
We played some team games as a class outside
We made dens in forest school and even had hot chocolate in them!
We were really lucky because some parents came into to read to us in Russian and Italian!
We learnt about Sukkah's in Judaism and made our own in nature!
We have had lots of fun learning over the past few weeks. Some of the things we have been doing are:
Acting out the creation story
Exploring place value in math's
Writing diaries about the great fire of London
Miss Palmer found some photos of dinosaurs in school so we wrote diary entry's about being children at a school with dinosaurs! See the pictures for yourself below.
We made play dough in activity time
We have been writing in our play journals
Learning Makaton- we know so many signs now!
Drawing harvest festival pictures with chalk on the playground
Forest school fun!
We have been thinking about how we can help regulate our emotions using the zones of regulation and we have been deciding which zone we are in using our zones board and picture cards!
Making fire engines
AUTUMN TERM 1
Topic: The Great Fire of London
Y2 Maths Summary:
Approximate summaries of maths coverage throughout Y2.
The children have done great job on their second week in year 2! Below I have attached some photos of the fun we have had this week. Some of our learning has been:
Writing about the great fire of London and making freeze-frames of us pretending to be Londoners waking up to the fire.
Forest school! We made tutor houses out of sticks.
Rainbow challenges
Representing numbers in different ways in Maths
Some of our recent learning: (Summer 1- weeks 1-3)
- We have been learning about plants in science and did an experiment where we dissected seeds!
- We have been learning about maps in Geography and this week we learnt how to use Atlases and created our own continents in teams and then presented them.
- In literacy we have started our writing on 'Little Red Reading Hood' we are such enthusiastic authors in year 2.
- In PE we have been doing dance based on our science topic-plants. We created our own danced to represent the life cycle of a plant.
- In computing we have started to think about robots and how we give computers instructions we practiced being robots and gave each other instructions.
- In design and technology we started to think about our project for this half term 'Baby Bears Chair' we explored different structures and their properties and tested this making 3D shapes out of playdough and measuring how stable they were. We showed excellent team-work.
- In math's we started our new topic on fractions, we have been being such brave learners!
- We have had lots of fun building with the Kapla bricks during activity time- look at our fantastic constructions!
Autumn Term 1 Project Activities for Home
Here are some activities to compliment the topic work that we are doing at school. There will be time to share your projects on the last day of this half term.
1. Diary Entry. Imagine that you lived in London during the Great Fire. Write a diary entry to describe what happened and how you felt.
2. Design. The Great Fire has happened and you need to design a new city. How would you design your city to prevent the the spread of another fire?
3. Get Arty. Create your own silhouette of the city during the fire.
4. Great Fire of London Family Walk. Take a walk in London and look for the different monuments
and areas. There is a family walk that you can book that can be found here: https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/museum-london/event-detail?id=73409. Take photos and bring them to class!
5. Visit the Museum of London. There is a great exhibition on War, Plague and Fire at the Museum of London. Write a recount of your visit and include pictures.