Year 2 w/b 29th November
Date: 5th Dec 2021 @ 6:21pm
Our week began with a wonderful snowy playtime, as the children enjoyed building snowmen and creating patterns in the snow with Year One. The rest of the week revealed itself to be full of fun and lots of superb learning. I have been extremely proud of the children’s hard work.
Our English learning began with the introduction of a model text for a superhero narrative. On Monday, we analysed this model text, looking for examples of: conjunctions, similes, expanded noun phrases, adverbs, exclamation marks and questions. The children are becoming SPaG experts! Analysing this model text inspired us to plan our own superhero narratives, drawing on our ideas from our recent letters. We focused on including lots of ambitious vocabulary in our plans so that we remember to use this in our writing. The children proved that they were excellent at referring to their plans during our first writing session. The openings and build-ups of the stories include lots of wonderful descriptive language. I am looking forward to reading how these stories progress next week.
In maths, we continued our work with money. We first looked at the value of notes and finding total amounts of them. We then progressed to counting different amounts of money (both coins and notes together) and recorded our answers in pounds and pence (separately) e.g. £28 and 37p. Finally, we worked on selecting the right amount of coins and notes for a given amount e.g. make £11 and 75p. Within this lesson, we also began to look at finding how much money is left over.
On Monday, our target games session was prevented by the snow and ice outside and the restrictions of the stage and lighting in the hall. Therefore, to ensure safety, we instead completed a winter dance session within our PE slot. The children enjoyed moving in a variety of ways in this session as we particularly focused on different ways of travelling. Mrs Warren and I also noticed some wonderful final poses as the photos below show.
Our RE session was dedicated to answering the following assessment questions: Why do Christians think going to church is important? What does visiting and belonging to a church mean to a Christian? This task was preceded by a rich, thoughtful discussion and produced some beautiful answers.
On Wednesday, we enjoyed our final art session of the half-term. This week, we were able to add colour to our portraits in a different way, using a cotton bud and paint to continue to add colour in the style of Roy Lichtenstein. This prompted discussions about which effect the children preferred and why.
Our HeartSmart session began with watching the Pixar short film ‘Boundin’. We described the different range of emotions the lamb felt throughout. We noticed that the Jackalope pointed out the things the lamb had to be thankful for (body, legs and feet and the different things he can do now) and reflected upon how the lamb’s attitude changed once he realised he still had a lot to be thankful for. This helped us to suggest things that we can do with our bodies that we are thankful for as we thought about our ‘gratitude attitude’.
With the start of Advent, we thought about how we prepare both our homes and hearts for Christmas. It has been lovely to hear about all the different ways the class prepares for Christmas with their traditions at home. We also had the opportunity to think about advent as a time to look out into the community and at School we are doing just this with our Advent gifting. Thank you so much to all of you who have already contributed so generously to this food appeal.
On the 1st December, children were very excited to arrive to see the Christmas decorations in the classroom and we all enjoyed decorating the Christmas tree together.
Much of our week has, once again, been dedicated to our Nativity preparations. We really look forward to welcoming you to one of our four performances of ‘Prickly Hay’ next week. The children have been working hard and the Christian Christmas retelling of that first Christmas over 2000 years ago is delivered by Key Stage One with sparkle, enthusiasm, and enjoyment. On Friday, an email was sent out with information about the arrangements for the performances.
Have a lovely weekend.
Miss Witham
