Year 2 w/b 13th February
Date: 16th Feb 2023 @ 4:26pm
What a super week of learning we have had in Year Two! At the start of the week, the children were very excited to plan their own version of a twisted narrative, changing the traditional tale of Jack and the Beanstalk to create a twisted narrative like Jack and the Baked Beanstalk. First, we planned the events and characters of the story, allowing us to focus all of our attention on ‘what happens’. Then, we added lots of story features and vocabulary to our plans, planning for paragraph openers, expanded noun phrases, similes, exclamation sentences and ambitious vocabulary. For the rest of the week, children wrote their twisted narratives. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading each and every one of these stories full of imaginative ideas. It was delightful to notice Year Two’s aspiration and endeavour to include a variety of narrative features identified in last week’s ‘analyse’ stage, such as expanded noun phrases, adverbs, interesting openers, repetition, similes, adventurous verbs and exclamation sentences. It is always wonderful to see children feeling so proud of the final outcome of the writing sequence. Well done Year Two authors! I wonder which book will capture our imaginations next half term?
Our spelling rule this week has been: o spelt ‘a’ after w (e.g. wash, want, wander) and qu (e.g. quarrel, squash, quantity). Our red words of the week were: Saturday, could, says, were, small, want.
In science this week, the objective was to explain the results of our investigation. The children compared the bean plants that had been growing in the classroom to those that had been growing outdoors. This helped them to write up the results of the experiment and draw a conclusion. Next, we researched the important question ‘How does a cactus survive in the desert without any water?’ We found out a very interesting fact; Cacti have a thick, hard-walled and succulent stem so when it rains, water is stored in the stem.
In geography, we have completed our end of unit quiz on the topic ‘Food around the world’. I am so impressed; we really do have a fantastic bunch of geographers in Year Two!
Last week on 7th February, it was Safer Internet Day. This was the 20th year the day has been celebrated globally. To mark this in the UK we have been celebrating by putting children and young people’s voices at the heart of the day and encouraging them to shape the online safety support that they receive. To celebrate this, on Tuesday we read ‘Hanni and the Magic Window’. This story is about a young girl called Hanni, who has a magic window at home but when she sees something that upsets her, she struggles to explain what has happened. As a class, we discussed that Hanni’s magic window was a lot like the technology we may have at home and if we see something that makes us feel sad, we should tell those we trust. Finally, we discussed some questions before making our own magic window full of all of our favourite things.
In maths this week, we have continued our topic ‘Multiplication and Division’ and have been looking at:
- Using repeated subtraction to model division calculations. We have been putting numbers into equal groups using counters and showing this on a number line.
- Learning another strategy for dividing by sharing a number equally into groups.
- Learning the 2 times-table in a number of contexts and working out 2 times-table multiplication sentences.
- Relating multiplication facts from the 2 times-table to dividing by 2. Children have said how many ‘groups of 2’ there are.
Thank you so much for your wonderful support this half term. It is a pleasure to see children working hard at home to improve their spelling, reading, maths and times tables. This support is invaluable and is helping the children to make excellent progress. I am so very proud of them all. I hope that you all enjoy a fun-filled yet restful half term and I look forward to seeing the children again soon.
Miss Roxburgh
