Year 2 w/b 27th February

Date: 2nd Mar 2023 @ 5:17pm

It has been wonderful to welcome the children back to school this week; I hope that you enjoyed a lovely break. As they arrived, the children were very curious about our new English display. They noticed objects such as a boat, binoculars, cars, farm animals and jungle animals. In our discussion, we asked: What are they? How are they connected? Do they link in any way? What are these links? Who owns them? Where might you see objects/animals like this? Are they all from the same place? How do these objects relate to the boat? Does it remind you of any stories you know? In what ways? We also looked at five illustrations from our new book, asking: What do you notice about this place? Is it a nice place to live? Why? Does it look like our school? What is different? What is the same? What do you notice about the river? Can you see any people? What time of the day might it be? How do you know? Following this discussion, we worked in groups to list any questions we had about these five illustrations, hoping to answer them when we were able to read our new book. On Wednesday, the title and front cover were revealed…A River by Marc Martin. As we studied the front cover, we considered the following questions: What animals may be hidden? How would you roam around this place? How would you feel? How would you react to the things you are able to see? What might you see, hear and feel? After gathering ideas, we were able to write a senses list poem.

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’).

In maths this week we have been coming to the end of our ‘Multiplication and Division’ unit. We have been learning the following:

• Understanding the difference between odd and even. Working out whether a number is odd or even by grouping it in 2s.
• The 10 times-table in a number of contexts and making links to place value. Children have been reasoning about sentences involving × 10.
• Dividing numbers by 10 and linking multiplication facts for the 10 times-table to dividing by 10 and showing this on a number line.

In PE this week, we have been very excited to welcome Multiflex back who will be teaching ‘Dance’ this half term. This week, we have been building foundations to learn a dance by learning the count to 8 by tapping the floor to the beat. Next, we learned how to ‘groove’ and how to master a new ‘technique’ of high kicks. We now know that we must keep our legs straight when we kick. Finally, we learned the start of our new dance. Our favourite move had to be the ‘Bart Simpson’, which I am sure children will be eager to show you at home. We are very much looking forward to learning more of the dance next week.

In computing this half term, our unit will focus on programming, specifically algorithms and debugging. This combination of unplugged and plugged-in activities help to develop an understanding of; what algorithms are, how to program them and how they can be developed to be more efficient, including the introduction of loops. On Wednesday, we looked at the website ‘Scratch’ as a class, focusing on a dinosaur game. We completed a ‘decomposition task’ to identify what happens when a certain button is pressed, before focusing on the skill of writing programs by suggesting new commands for the dinosaur. On Friday, we were learning that computers can use algorithms, which are instructions, to make informed and calculated predictions (machine learning) and help teach a computer program how to interpret different drawings. To look at this in context, we played Google – Quick, draw!, which uses algorithms to guess the images that you draw. We explored the images collected for the different objects it has asked people to draw, a large collection of data that is then used by the computer, and identified incorrect images in order to teach the program what the drawings should and should not look like. Next, in pairs, we built a small model using Lego and wrote a set of instructions (algorithm) so that another pair would be able to recreate the model. When we swapped over, only one pair in the class was able to recreate a model with total accuracy. This helped us to recognise that algorithms must be very detailed and very clear

In art, we were introduced to our artist for this half term: Hannah Dunnett. First, we explored a range of her artwork; the children were amazed by the details and interesting shapes in these pieces and found similarities between Hannah Dunnett’s work and the illustrations in ‘A River’. We then experimented with lines, shapes and patterns to practise drawing trees, clouds, waves and fish in a Hannah Dunnett style. Next, we began to plan our own piece of artwork, inspired by Hannah Dunnett. Within this lesson, our focus when planning was lines and shapes within the piece. We also drew illustrations to depict our favourite Bible stories within the shape of a cross.  We used watercolour then black pen to embellish our designs.  We are hoping to display them around school and in church.

In RE this week, we ventured into the forest area to be detectives and search for sign of spring and new life.  We thought about how nature is now coming alive after sleeping through the winter.  We then drew the things we saw, felt, heard and smelt outside and realised how wonderful our world is and how grateful we are that God created everything for us.

Finally, we have thoroughly enjoyed a variety of activities to celebrate World Book Day. How wonderful it was to look at the variety of costumes to discover the children’s favourite book characters! World Book Day itself began with an online class assembly ‘The Big World Book Day Draw Along’. We were introduced to the brilliant author/illustrator due Swapna Haddow and Sheena Dempsey for a jam-packed event as they jumped into the world of Dave Pigeon: Bookshop Mayhem. They told us where they get their ideas, their top tips for creating our own stories, and we even got the chance to draw-a-long. After this, we were very excited to welcome Mrs Wood into Year Two to write the opening paragraph of the Brereton Story, it was great to see that children were full of fantastic ideas and thoroughly enjoyed this session. To read the full story, you can find it on our Facebook page. After lunch, we had the opportunity to read with Year Four and show them all of our favourite books and we hope to read again with them soon! After this, I welcomed children to ‘Miss Roxburgh’s Restaurant’ for an exclusive book tasting! The children tried a starter, main course and dessert of books. They were then able to fill in their menu, which involved: identifying the title and author of the book; identifying the genre; giving the book a star rating; writing their opinion of the book after ‘tasting’ it; and collecting any interesting vocabulary from the book. To end a lovely day, we listened to the finished version of Brereton’s story. We thought this was fantastic and were so proud to see our own wonderful ideas in the story, we could not believe the ending too!

Have a lovely weekend and we look forward to seeing everyone on Monday.

Miss Roxburgh and Mrs Taylor