Year 2 w/b 24th January
Date: 28th Jan 2022 @ 5:07pm
I am so very proud of Year Two for their resilience and diligence in this rather unusual week. Children both in school and at home (those who were not feeling poorly) worked very hard and have impressed me with both the quality and quantity of their work. Thank you all very much for your support with this. For our friends who are feeling poorly, we are sending you lots of love and we hope that you feel better soon. We have missed you!
Our week began with an opportunity to use purple pens for the first time – this was very exciting! We learnt that purple pens can be used to both correct and improve our writing. The children then worked on their letters to fix any SPaG mistakes and made revisions and additions to their writing to make it even better. We found common exception word mats, word banks and thesauri to be particularly helpful in this process. We then published our writing which is now proudly on display. We focused on our letter formation and sizing within this process; these are essential elements of correct handwriting. On Wednesday, we began the process of writing a second letter in order to ‘prove what you know’. We decided to write a letter to persuade people to either visit or avoid Jack’s Fast Food Van. Some of the reasons were very creative! On Thursday, we then wrote this piece independently as a chance to demonstrate our knowledge of persuasive letters. I was extremely impressed with the language that was used in these letters. I am also seeing wonderful improvement in the children’s spelling. Thank you for your support with this at home. On Friday, the children enjoyed a short SPaG session with Mr Cotton, looking at expanded noun phrases.
Our spelling rule has once again been ‘adding the suffix -y’. However, this week, we focused on adding -y when the root word ended in ‘e’ (e.g. bone, breeze, shine). After some initial exploration, we realised that the rule was ‘drop the e before adding -y’ (e.g. bony, breezy, shiny). We also focused on the red words: Wednesday, friend, here, worse, thought, other.
In maths, we finished our work with multiplication. On Monday we learnt the 10 times-table in a number of contexts, made explicit links to place value and ordered/compared/reasoned about sentences involving x10. On Tuesday, we applied our knowledge of multiplication to word problems where the concept ‘times as big’ was introduced, comparing quantities by saying how many times bigger something is. Year Two really impressed me during this session as this is a tricky concept! We will recap this learning later in the year. From Wednesday onwards, we have been working on division. We began with making groups, using repeated subtraction on a number line to support this concept. We then learnt another strategy for dividing by sharing a number equally into groups. Finally, we were dividing by 2 as children related 2 times-table facts to dividing by 2, saying how many groups of 2 there were. We will continue to look at division next week.
In geography, we have been looking at the differences between seasonal and daily weather patterns. In Year Two, we keep a whole class daily weather diary to observe and describe daily weather patterns. Each day, we record the weather on our class chart, shading the weather that applies. This creates a bar graph which allows us to observe which types of weather are more common depending on the season. Using this diary, we created a whole class pictogram to show the daily weather that we observed in November. Next, we looked at how weather may differ between inland and coastal areas, using Torquay and Yeovil as examples. We created pictograms for a month of weather in both areas and then identified differences between the two.
Our Forest School session was a wonderful opportunity to enrich this geography learning – we created wind chimes! Mr Simmons showed us ‘easy, medium and hard’ methods of creating wind chimes from nature. We were then able to self-select our challenge level and create our own wind chimes. It was great to see the children applying the lashing skills we had previously used to make poppies. These wind chimes were decorated with a variety of natural objects, such as pinecones, sticks, feathers, leaves and conkers. This session was so much fun! We can’t wait to refer to these wind chimes when completing our weather diary, looking to see how much they are blowing to help us to describe the amount of wind.
Our focus in music this week was pitch. We identified and responded to pitch changes by playing the ‘Stand Up, Sit Down’ game. Next, we looked at representing 3 pitches (high, medium, low) by drawing dots at the top, middle and bottom of the whiteboard. We enjoyed writing different arrangements of the 3 notes on the board and then playing them on a glockenspiel. After recapping the song When Goldilocks Went to the House of the Bears, we selected a note for Daddy Bear, Mummy Bear and Baby Bear. We played phrases connected to the bears in their corresponding note (e.g. Who’s been eating from my bowl? Who’s eaten my porridge? Who’s sitting in my chair? Who’s broken my bed?) to practise playing rhythms.
In RE, we continued to learn about the Kingdom of God. We thought about actions that could help God’s Kingdom grow on Earth. The children suggested a variety of actions, such as: participating in worship, including through prayer and singing hymns; looking after the environment; donating to charities and food banks; spreading the word of God; reading stories from the Bible; treating others with kindness. We contrasted these suggestions with actions which do not belong in God’s Kingdom, such as fighting, bullying, littering or stealing. This helped us to create a picture to show actions that belong in God’s Kingdom and those that do not. We realised that small good actions can lead to much greater good and grow God’s Kingdom on Earth.
We enjoyed another PE session working on our invasion game skills. In this session, we focused on: tracking a pass, intercepting a pass and moving our bodies in order to apply attacking and defending skills. We played ‘Fox and Geese’ and a ‘Piggy in the middle’ style game to learn and practise these skills. We then enjoyed applying these skills within a whole-class team game. Each team had to roll the ball to the end of the pitch, from one person to another. This was tricky as we weren’t allowed to move our feet when we had the ball! This was an enjoyable game where lots of teamwork and good sportsmanship was demonstrated and it finally ended in a draw. Well done Year 2!
Thursday’s HeartSmart session was entitled ‘Everday Heroes’. We were learning about the people who work hard in our community to keep it safe and help the people who live there. The children suggested a variety of people, including: police officers, firefighters, refuse collectors, doctors, nurses, teachers, vets and opticians. We each made an ‘Everyday Hero’ poster and wrote a thank you message to these people working in the community.
In science, the children were delighted to plant their beans. Some are now growing in the garden and some are growing in the classroom. We will enjoy keeping an eye on them and making observations over the next few weeks.
This week, we were thrilled to welcome Mrs Winward into school to read her new book, Zee Zee the Zebra. The children were captivated as they discovered the challenges that Zee Zee faced due to the fact that she looked different to the other Zebras. We were relieved to discover that Zee Zee and her friends learned that being different is ok because it’s what makes us all special. Year Two were excited and proud to display our copy of the story in our reading corner and have already enjoyed reading it independently. Thank you, Mrs Winward!
Year Twos, both in school and at home, you have been absolutely wonderful this week. We hope to welcome some more of our friends back to school next week as we are missing you all!
I hope that you manage to have a restful, healthy weekend.
Miss Witham
