Year 2 w/b 20th June
Date: 24th Jun 2022 @ 3:56pm
What a superb sports week it has been! On Monday afternoon, we enjoyed watching staff vs Year 6 playing rounders in the sunshine. On Tuesday, Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 enjoyed a rotation of activities: dance, team building and rounders skills. On Wednesday, Multiflex were encouraging children to try something new so they were introduced to Danish longball which was a mix between cricket, rounders and baseball. This was great fun and all the children loved being involved. To end our week, we took part in a very exciting circus skills session. In the session we learnt how to spin plates, use flower sticks to perform tricks, balance peacock feathers and work on other circus skills using the incredible resources. We had plenty of time to try out some of the other skills including juggling, mini bike riding, diablo, unicycling whilst also dressing up as clowns! Finally, there was the opportunity to perform your favourite trick in a Year 2 circus show. The pictures below capture some of the energy and skill from our morning.
Amongst these exciting sporting activities, we were able to complete our planning stage of our English unit. This week, we have been planning our own explanation texts. Of course, we first had to design them! We drew and labelled the parts of our own inventions, which ranged from ‘The fantastic bedroom cleaning machine’ to ‘The money maker’. All of these machines sound like they would be very useful or just a lot of fun! We then applied a different planning technique…we drew our own text maps completely from scratch. It was great to see the children planning for each sentence to include creative ideas and ambitious vocab (planned using pictures) and conjunctions and interesting sentence openers (written as key words). The children could then read their text maps back, showing me that they will be a very useful plan next week. I can’t wait to read each and every one of these explanations.
Our spelling rule this week was: the ‘r’ sound spelt ‘wr’. We looked at lots of words beginning with ‘wr’, including: write, wrap, wreck, wrong, wrestle, wriggle, wrist. Our red words of the week were: says, water, there, what, break, why. We will recap these again next week as it was a shorter week of spellings due to all of our other lovely activities.
In whole class guided reading, we finished our work with ‘Grandpa’s Garden’ by Stella Fry. There has been lots of ambitious vocabulary to unpick in this text and Year 2 have certainly risen to the challenge! We shall look forward to starting our new text next week.
Across Monday and Tuesday, we finished our work with time. On Monday, we were finding the start time, using our ‘bendy number line’ to this time count backwards in fives. E.g. Break time lasts for 20 minutes. It ends at ten to 11. What time did it start? We could find ten to 11 on our clocks and then count back in fives to 20, landing on…half past 10. On Tuesday, we ensured that we understood that there are 24 hours in a day and the hour hand therefore travels around the clock twice every day so there are 2 of each time in a day (e.g. 9 o’clock in the morning and 9 o’clock at night). We then applied this understanding to questions. E.g. A bench is painted at half past 2 in the afternoon on Thursday. It will be dry 24 hours later. Can you sit on it at 1 o’clock in the afternoon on Friday? No, because 24 hours later would be half past 2 on Friday – the paint would still be wet! As telling the time is such an important life skill, it is so important that the children continue to practise time telling and do not consider it to be a unit of work that is finished - it is an ongoing skill. On Thursday, we began our new unit: weight, volume and temperature. We used balance scales to compare the mass of two or more objects and used chains of reasoning to order the mass of more than two objects. On Friday, we explored the use of standard units of mass (grams) and how we can measure these using both balance scales and weighing scales. It was interesting to hold weights in our hands to compare their mass and such fun making sure the scales were balanced!
In Forest School, the children continued to make their own inventions, using nature and the wheels, planks and other equipment available in Forest School. Wonderful teamwork was shown once again in this session.
In science, our work with materials continued. This week the objective was to observe and record objects made from different materials. The children became material detectives, finding objects in the classroom made from wood, plastic, glass and metal.
In RE, we continued to develop our understanding of Shabbat. To help consolidate this understanding, we looked at each stage of Shabbat in more detail, looking at some objects and trying some of the food and drink. After switching off the electrical items, ensuring the room was tidy and covering the challah bread, I told the children the blessing that is said by Jewish parents to their children. Then, we lit the two candles. Next, the wine is blessed and then drunk from the kiddush cup; we looked at a kiddush cup. We tried some cranberry juice to replace the wine. Finally, we enjoyed the opportunity to taste some challah bread. This experience helped us to consider how Jews show love for God during Shabbat. For example, turning off electrical items to spend time with God and our loved ones without distractions.
In Spanish, we continued to practise our knowledge of colours and numbers through songs and a wordsearch!
In music, we continued to journey around the world, stopping this time in Poland. We listened and sang along to the song Tanczymy Labada; this is a children’s playground song and translates as ‘we are dancing the labada, a funny waltz’. Here is the link if you would like to sing this at home: https://youtu.be/G1MSVechi34
My Happy Mind this week build on all of our learning so far. We looked at how team H-A-P respond to how we are feeling. Like all teams, they work best when they are all working together. When we are happy and regulated team H-A-P work in harmony with each other. The opposite of this happens when we are sad, stressed or unhappy. Our amygdala can take over our whole brain sending our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus to sleep. If this happens the amygdala doesn’t pass any information to the prefrontal cortex and this will cause you to react with a flight, flight or freeze response. The good news is we can wake the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex by doing something called happy breathing. This week we learnt one technique for happy breathing. Talking about and trying this out at home would be helpful.
Yesterday, we also enjoyed a lovely service at Church learning about the sisters Mary and Martha and their visit by Jesus. Mary stopped and listened to Jesus, whilst Martha pushed on with cleaning, cooking and tidying jobs. As Sandi explained there is a time to stop and listen and a time for keeping busy and we should aim to do both in our own lives. The children walked beautifully to and from Church in the glorious sunshine.
I hope that you all enjoy a lovely weekend and Mr McAulay and I shall look forward to seeing you at parent consultations on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Miss Witham
