Year 2 w/b 6th February

Date: 13th Feb 2023 @ 3:33pm

It has been a thoroughly enjoyable week in Year Two, with lots of wonderful effort, collaboration and proud moments.

Our week began with the introduction of a new model text and text map – the traditional tale, Jack and the Beanstalk. We enjoyed a vocabulary lesson, focusing on words from the model text such as, dilapidated, penniless, bronze, entirely, mysterious, launched, peeked, peered, bellowed, lumbered, ear-splitting, eventually. After some whole-class discussions and collaborative use of dictionaries and thesauri, the children were able to confidently define this new vocabulary. They even used these words in sentences to further demonstrate their understanding. Next it was time to analyse our model text to identify the structures and features of a narrative text. This was a good opportunity to recap our SPaG knowledge as we worked both collaboratively and individually to highlight exclamation sentences, expanded noun phrases, verbs, adverbs, alliteration, repetition, time adverbials and paragraphs. What a lot of wonderful work! We are looking forward to planning and writing our twisted narratives next week.

Our spelling rule this week has been: the ‘j’ sound spelt ‘g’ (e.g. magic, giant), ‘ge’ (e.g. large, charge) and ‘dge’ (e.g. edge, bridge). It would be fantastic if you could practise these spellings at home please.

In maths this week we have continued with our topic ‘Multiplication and Division’. We have been looking at:

• Understanding that objects can be grouped together and that groups containing the same number of objects are equal groups. We then made written sentences from these equal groups.
• Developing skills in understanding the language of equal groups and apply it to drawing, arranging and making equal groups.
• Working out a total by counting equal groups through repeated addition.
• Writing repeated addition and multiplication sentences to match a picture. We have been matching sentences describing the number of equal groups with the correct multiplication and repeated addition sentences.
• Writing calculations as multiplication number sentences to represent different equal grouping situations.
• Learning how to relate arrays to a multiplication sentence. Children have been using arrays to fill in sentence scaffolds and make their own arrays.

This week it has been Children’s mental health week and the theme has been ‘Let’s connect’. To introduce the theme, we looked at a single piece of Lego and agreed to build anything we needed more pieces to connect with it to build something wonderful. Next, we stood in circles holding hands with a hula hoop over one of our arms. We had to work together to pass the hula hoop around the circle whilst still holding hands and keeping our connection. Children were successful as they worked together as a team encouraging each other and using their problem solving skills effectively. Finally, we discussed our ‘invisible strings’ that connect us to family, friends, pets and even people that have died or that we no longer have much contact with. We drew ourselves in the middle of coloured paper and drew strings to all those people in our lives that keep us connected and help us feel loved. Please now continue to enjoy participating in some of the wellbeing challenges sent out this week. This may be a lovely focus as we head towards half term.

In science this week, we have been writing up our method of how we planted our bean last week. Next, we had a look at our plants to see if they are growing and carefully drew this in our books. We are very excited to say that they are growing already! Keep a look out for photos in the coming weeks. In geography this week, we looked at similarities and differences between food that is grown in the UK compared to food grown in Jamaica. After a lot of research, we were surprised to find out that bananas are grown all year in Jamaica!

In Collective worship we have been introduced to a slight change to our Vision and Values. Our Vision remained ‘To Love God, Love Learning and Love One Another’ but we do this so we can all ‘Flourish’. This second part is new and links well with the vision for the Church of England. Our 8 values that underpin our vision remain, but we are under 4 new headings:

• Wisdom
• Hope
• Community
• Respect

On Thursday afternoon, we were very fortunate to have a music workshop by Hannah Donkin from Music Squad. We spent the afternoon exploring the piano/keyboard and by the end of the lesson we performed as part of ‘Brereton class band’. We really do have wonderful musicians in Year Two!

I hope you all have a fantastic weekend and I look forward to seeing you all on Monday.

Miss Roxburgh