Year 2 w/b 1st November
Date: 5th Nov 2021 @ 4:43pm
It has been lovely to welcome the children back to school for another half-term in Year Two; I was so pleased to see each and every one of them. Our week began with a shocking discovery when we returned from breaktime to find that Miss Witham’s jewels had been stolen! We noticed that the culprits had left behind some clues. We spotted some green slime splattered by the treasure chest, there were some leaves blown in from outside and Miss Witham had felt a gust of wind. These clues helped us to make predictions about the baddies who had stolen the jewels, using ‘because’ to explain our thinking. Thankfully, Mrs Sant looked on the CCTV and eventually identified the baddies as the troublesome two, Filth and Vacuum. On Wednesday, we read the first section of our story, ‘Send for a Superhero’. Then, in forest school, we used nature to design a superhero that we thought would be capable of defeating Filth and Vacuum. Mr Simmons was very impressed with the children’s creativity and independence during this session. As the photos show, this was a most enjoyable activity and the creations were excellent! On Thursday, we focused on adding the suffixes -ful and -less to create adjectives. We discovered that, for most words, the suffix is added with no change to the root word. However, if the root word ends in ‘y’ we needed to change the ‘y’ to an ‘i’ before adding the suffix. The children then used these adjectives (e.g. powerful, helpful, fearless) in some sentences to describe their superhero. Today, we were introduced to the whole story for the first time. We thought that it was a very funny book and especially enjoyed the character, ‘Extremely Boring Man’. We then learnt about the use of apostrophes in contractions, such as ‘don’t, it’s, haven’t, couldn’t, he’d.
Our first two maths lessons of the week involved ‘crossing ten’ to add and subtract, using ten frames to support our learning. We then returned to our column method. On Thursday, we were able to add 2-digit numbers using this method, making sure to add the ones first and then the tens. Today, we began to learn the concept of ‘exchanging’. This will help us as we start to exchange within the column method next week (which you may know as ‘carrying’).
This week has been ‘computing week’ for Year Two, so each afternoon has been dedicated to a computing lesson. On Tuesday, we learnt the parts of a computer and were able to label a desktop computer and a laptop. Then, on a laptop, we created a digital drawing of a computer. The children showed wonderful skill, determination and resilience within this activity, as it is certainly not easy to draw using a laptop! On Wednesday, we learnt about inputs and outputs. We enjoyed using the ‘Year Two remote control’ to input commands (by pressing buttons) and observing the output (actions performed by the rest of the class). Next, we designed our own robots and decided what would happen if we pressed certain buttons. On Thursday, we worked in teams to complete a ‘technology safari’ around the school, spotting examples of technology and explaining how we identified them. Today, we focused on the use of technology in supermarkets. We very much enjoyed this role play activity! Some children used ‘scanners’ to complete their shopping. At the tills, the supermarket employees then updated their ‘database’ as well as completing the transaction. Other children used iPads to take photos of this activity and we were each able to have a turn at every station. Year Two have been superstars in their computing week!
This week, we have also been introduced to our first handwriting joins. I will pop these onto Showbie for you to see.
I hope that you have a wonderful weekend and I shall look forward to seeing you all again on Monday.
Miss Witham
