Year 2 w/b 17th April

Date: 20th Apr 2023 @ 5:06pm

We have all thoroughly enjoyed our first week back in school after the Easter holidays.

On Monday morning when we returned from breaktime, our classroom was dark and there was a sign on the door stating ‘Light is Banned Here!’; we were intrigued! After an interesting discussion around darkness, we worked as a class to create a simile poem to convey how darkness can make us feel. Next, we explored the fascinating objects around the English working wall: lanterns, candles, a house and a castle. As a class, we discussed and debated how these objects may relate to our story and connect to each other. This helped us to predict what the story would be about and justify our thinking. At last, the title and front cover of the Vehicle Text were revealed…’The King Who Banned the Dark’ by Emily Haworth-Booth. Reading the blurb helped us to alter and expand on our original predictions. We enjoyed a thorough exploration of the story and the illustrations, constantly making inferences and discussing the effect on the reader. On Tuesday, we identified narrative features (adverbials of time, adjectives, exclamation sentences, question sentences, adverbs and conjunctions) in our model text and talked about their purpose. We are looking forward to planning and writing our own banning narratives next week.

Our spelling rule this week has been adding the suffix –er and –est. An example of this is ‘brave’, ‘braver’ and ‘bravest’.

In maths this week, we have been finishing off our unit on ‘Mass, capacity and temperature’. We have been looking at:

• What litres are and how to carry out a variety of calculations using litres.
• Reading temperatures from a thermometer and using temperature to make simple comparisons and to carry out calculations. For example, comparing the temperature in Aberdeen (9 degrees) to York (11 degrees).
• Applying knowledge of counting in 2s, 5s and 10s to read different scales on thermometers.

On Thursday, we started our new unit ‘Fractions’. We have been looking at:

• The difference between a whole and a part in different contexts. For example, the United Kingdom is the whole and England is a part.
• Identifying equal parts of a whole in different contexts including shape, quantity, volume and money.

It was very exciting to have our first history lesson of the term. Our focus was to understand the events of the Great Fire of London. How shocking it was to find that such a devastating fire had originated in a bakery! It was interesting to learn that much of what we know about these events has been learnt from the diary of Samuel Pepys. However, we were surprised that anybody (except maybe Mrs Warren!) would consider cheese to be a precious possession and therefore choose to bury it. To demonstrate our understanding of these events, we were able to sequence them chronologically in the form of a timeline. We were also very excited to try on a fireman’s hat, just like the ones they would have worn during the Great Fire of London.

In science this week, we started the lesson by having a look at the habitat survey we completed outside in the playground before the Easter holidays. As a class, we completed a pictogram graph using data from one habitat. After this, we discussed how we could record data with a larger numerical range and decided that one pictogram could be worth two, five or ten minibeasts.

In RE, we started our new topic about the Holy Spirit. We had to guess several familiar logos and symbols and explain how we knew what they were.  We then read half of the story when God sends the Holy Spirit to the Disciples (Day of Pentecost) and had to think what happened next, we were quite surprised when the Disciples started to cure the villagers, just like Jesus did.

In DT, we learnt about levers, linkages and pivots, a linkage is a mechanism made by joining levers together.  We practised making a lever from strips of card and split pins, then created a linkage system. It was rather tricky but we all persevered and created our own mechanisms.

We hope you have a fantastic weekend and look forward to seeing you on Monday.

Miss Roxburgh and Mrs Taylor