Year 2 w/b 25th April
Date: 29th Apr 2022 @ 5:54pm
What a lot of learning we have enjoyed during a sunny second week of the summer term! We have been particularly busy in our English lessons this week, beginning with our ‘analyse’ day on Monday. In our model text, we identified narrative features (adverbials of time, adjectives, exclamation sentences, question sentences, adverbs and conjunctions) and talked about their purpose. On Tuesday, we planned our narratives, taking time to discuss the events of our stories and finding pictures particularly useful to record this chronological sequence. Across Thursday and Friday, we have written our banning narratives. It was an eye-opening experience to discover what each child had chosen to ban! Next week, we will begin a sequence of learning to eventually write a recount of our trip to Nantwich.
Our spelling rule this week has once again involved adding the suffix ‘ed’. This week, we learnt to ‘drop the e before adding ed’ (e.g. ‘like’ becomes ‘liked’ and ‘tickle’ becomes ‘tickled’). We also revised our two other rules for adding ‘ed’: doubling the final consonant before adding ed (e.g. ‘hug’ becomes ‘hugged’) and swapping the y for an i before adding ed (e.g. ‘try’ becomes ‘tried’). Our red words of the week were: son, parents, father, school, clothes, come.
In our Monday maths lesson, we completed our work with statistics as we solved word problems involving tally charts, pictograms and block diagrams. We then began our work with measure. On Tuesday, we focused on measuring in centimetres – we were so confident with this that we were then able to apply our learning in our Forest School session. On Wednesday, we enjoyed some outdoor maths as we learnt to measure in metres. It was amazing to discover that a metre is equal to 100 centimetres! We thought about choosing the appropriate units of measure and making sensible estimates. We discovered that the school hall is 13m wide! Additionally, we used a handy trick to measure the door – we cut string to the height of the door, lay it on the floor and then measured it. This made it much easier to measure – the height of our classroom door was 2m. Finally, our Friday lesson involved comparing lengths. This was a good opportunity to consolidate our understanding of cm and m as well as revisiting our work with greater than, less than and equal to.
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.
In RE, we started to think carefully about baptism, beginning with the story of Jesus’ baptism. After listening to the story, we reflected on its importance to Christians. What is the most important part of the story? Why did Jesus come to be baptised? We then enjoyed retelling the story through role play. As part of this lesson, we also asked: Why was water used? Within this exploration, some children washed their hands in water to help us think about its properties and symbolism.
We once again enjoyed a wonderful PE session with Multiflex to focus on field game skills. This week, the children focused on stopping the ball with their bat in addition to continuing to develop their catching skills. These skills were applied wonderfully during Friday’s session with Cheshire Cricket.
Our Forest School session had a maths focus this week, as we followed the interests of the children; they had demonstrated a real enthusiasm for measuring a variety of objects. Therefore, we took our 30cm and 1m rulers into Forest School to see what we could measure. This was such fun and Mr Simmons was impressed with our mathematical confidence and skill.
On Thursday afternoon, we enjoyed both a HeartSmart lesson and a DT lesson. In DT, we were introduced to our design brief: to make a moving monster toy for a child to enjoy. This helped us to work as a class to construct the following design criteria. Our toys should: be fun, colourful, not too scary, not too small/fiddly and easy to move. We also began to explore some different mechanisms, noticing the mechanisms in a can opener, toy car, hole punch and a pair of scissors. We can’t wait to begin designing and making our toys!
Our HeartSmart lesson was entitled ‘The Truth About Me’ because we were learning that not all the thoughts we have about ourselves are true. After discussing the idea of ‘self-talk’ and the thoughts in our heads, we talked about the self-talk words that can be unkind ones that are not true. Unless you catch these thoughts and replace them with kind and true thoughts, you will continue to think the same unkind thoughts the next day and the next day and the next day! We practised catching these thoughts, stamping them out and replacing them with kind thoughts. We were then able to apply this understanding to a scenario where Boris had burnt a cake and made a mess in the kitchen; he was having lots of unkind thoughts about himself. Instead, we suggested 5 kind and true thoughts Boris could choose to have about himself. Year Two showed wonderful insight, empathy and kindness.
On Thursday, it was wonderful to welcome Bishop Sam Corley to Brereton. He thoroughly enjoyed his tour of school and meeting everyone before he led a worship which involved us all learning a little more about the roles and responsibilities of being a Bishop in the Church of England.
Enjoy the Bank Holiday and I look forward to seeing you all next week.
Many thanks for your continued support,
Miss Witham
