Year 2 w/b 7th June
Date: 12th Jun 2022 @ 6:19pm
A warm welcome back for the final half term of the year. The children and I are looking forward to all of the wonderful learning and experiences that we will enjoy before the end of the year.
In English, we were introduced to our new key text. Much excitement ensued about our new English display as we pondered the significance of the array of gadgets, tools and blueprints. With our curiosity piqued, we then looked at two illustrations from our story: a girl called Rosie rummaging through the trash and another image of her constructing with gadgets and gizmos. This helped us two practise two important comprehension skills: retrieval and inference. First, we focused on things we definitely knew from the illustrations (retrieval) e.g. Rosie has blonde hair. Then, using the conjunction because, we discussed what we could infer (what we think we know) from the illustrations e.g. Rosie is a happy girl because she’s smiling. Next, we listed questions that we had based on the illustrations e.g. Why is Rosie alone? Does she have any friends? Finally, we made predictions about the plot of the story. At last, our key text was revealed…Rosie Revere Engineer by Andrea Beaty. We enjoyed reading this story together and then engaged in a rich whole-class discussion. Our final task of the week focused on the vocabulary used in the story. After discussing the meanings of these words and phrases, we worked in groups to match the vocabulary to related images to demonstrate our understanding. Finally, we used these words and phrases in some sentences, challenging ourselves to use more than one and use conjunctions to extend our sentences.
Our spelling rule this week has once again involved adding the suffixes ‘er’ and ‘est’ to compare. This time, we were adding the suffixes to words ending in ‘y’. This allowed us to revisit a familiar rule: swapping the y for an i before adding the suffix (e.g. happy becomes happier or happiest). Our red words of the week were: behind, want, watch, wear, mind.
Our focus text in our whole class guided reading sessions this week was: ‘The Flower’ by John Light. We enjoyed reading all about Brigg and his quest to return flowers to the city and gave some excellent comprehension answers about this text.
In maths, we have returned to our focus on time. First, we revisited our learning from before the half term, using our individual clocks to make o’clock, half past, quarter past and quarter to times. For the remainder of the week, our focus has been time to 5 minutes. We used our knowledge of the 5 times table to help us to learn the intervals on a clock and that there are 60 minutes in an hour. We counted round in 5s to identify the ‘past’ and ‘to’ times, noticing the symmetry of the clock and the fact that we replace 0 past, 15 past, 30 past and 30 to with o’clock, quarter past, half past and quarter to. After lots of practise with our individual clocks and some mini challenges, we completed the Power Maths time to 5 minutes lesson on Friday. Next week, we will begin to work with durations of time. Thank you for your support at home with telling the time; this has really supported the children with their learning in school.
On Tuesday, we were introduced to our final RE unit of the year; we will be developing our understanding of Judaism. After some initial exploration of the religion to provide us with a background knowledge, we begin to look further at Shabbat. First, we recapped the story of creation and learnt that Christians and Jews have the same creation story, particularly emphasising the fact that God rested on the final day. We learnt that Jewish people have a special rest day with a special meal every week – Shabbat. We looked at the Shabbat candles; Kippah, Kiddush cup; pictures of the Challah bread. We watched this clip of Charlie and thought about the rules he must follow on Shabbat http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02mx9mx.
Our Forest School lesson enriched our English learning this week, as the children aimed to design their own invention, just like Rosie Revere, before enjoying some free time to explore the Forest School area. Next week, we will make our inventions using nature!
In DT, we completed our moving monsters! The children diligently followed the process, adding their split pins to create an effective linkage system to open and close the monster’s mouth. Then it was time to decorate, making each monster look very unique. We will look forward to sharing photographs of each monster with you in next week’s blog. As we constructed our monsters, some very interesting discussions ensued. For example, why were the mechanisms less effective when held up? How could we have made them stronger? This will help us to effectively evaluate our mechanisms next week.
In science, the children were exploring food chains. They worked in groups to order a selection of pictures to demonstrate their understanding of food chains.
In addition to our PE lesson with Multiflex this week, we enjoyed a session with Harry from Cheshire Cricket. We particularly focused on our batting skills, remembering how to hold a bat correctly and how to position our bodies to help hit a target.
We once again enjoyed the opportunity to learn Spanish! After recapping greetings, we focused on numbers and colours. I was impressed by how well the children had retained all of this information and enjoyed singing the catchy songs alongside the children. This session finished with a wordsearch to help us to identify the Spanish numbers and colours when they are written down.
As you will have seen on the letter that was sent to parents and carers this week, we have started a new program of learning called My Happy Mind. This week we started our fist module called Meet Your Brain. This unit is all about how your brain works and how you can help it to be at its very best. It was most interesting to learn that the brain is a pinkish-grey colour, is very wrinkled and feels like a squishy mushroom! We were introduced to Team H-A-P who make up three key parts of your brain: the hippocampus, amygdala and prefrontal cortex. We will be finding out more about the role of these three areas over the coming weeks.
I hope that you have enjoyed a wonderful weekend!
Miss Witham
