Year 2 News 11.06.21

Welcome back Year 2! I hope you had a wonderful half term. It was so lovely to see you all again on Monday. We also had an exciting surprise this week as a farmyard has appeared in our classroom. Why? This is because we will be learning about elements of farming now too. Don't worry, we won't be saying good bye to the Stone Age just yet though as we still have lots of exciting things to learn about it too. So why are we introducing elements of farming to our classroom? This is because Stone Age people invented farming. How amazing is that!

To kick off the farming theme, we have started a new Talk4Writing topic. The focus of our new topic is story writing. We are learning about traditional tales. For this unit, our work will be based around the story 'The Little Red Hen'. We have been learning the story this week and exploring where the story takes place. This is called the setting. The story of 'The Little Red Hen' takes place in the beautiful countryside on a farm. As a class, we came up with lots of different countryside settings, and then we chose some adjectives to describe them. By putting a noun and adjective together, we created a noun phrase. Good work team. We have also been looking at apostrophes for missing letters in English this week too.

In maths we have moved onto a new topic . . . Time! In our lessons this week, we have learnt about the days of the week and the months of the year. We learnt the order that they go in, and learnt how to read a calendar to find dates too. Good work everyone. As the week progressed, we moved on to telling the time. So far, we have learnt how to read o'clock and half past. You have really tried hard to master this new skill, and I am enormously proud of you. I would also like to say a big thank you to everyone who has started wearing their watch to school too. Good job!

This week our afternoon topics have had an art focus. Previously, we have been learning about cave paintings in art, and now it was time for us to make our own cave paintings. How exciting! Before we could start painting, we had to prep the cave wall. Unfortunately, we couldn't use a real cave wall. Instead, we glued sand to cardboard, waited for it to dry and then painted it grey. It looks really affective. Also, because cave people only painted in natural colours, we have learnt how to make brown this week. To do it, we were only allowed to use blue, red and yellow. We realised that you need a little bit of each one to make the brown.

For R.E this week, we began our new topic which is all about baptism. In this week's lesson we explored the story of John the Baptist and discussed what we thought the most important parts of the story were. After our discussions, we used drama to recreate the story. We used a drama technique called freeze frames to do this. You did a great job expressing the emotions and capturing the moment. Well done.

We have also started our D.T topic this week too. For this topic, our focus is textiles. You were able to tell me what textiles are which I was very impressed with. Good job. As part of our unit we will be joining two fabrics using running stitch. You remembered what running stitch was from your work in Year 1 (Miss Haynes will be so proud). We recapped what you needed to do for the stitch and practiced our running stitch skills.

In history this week, we learnt about the daily life of Stone Age people. We played a game of spot the difference to help us learn that during the Stone Age people moved from being nomadic hunter-gathers to people who settled down and built houses and farms. We then compared their lives to our lives today. Surprisingly, we realised that some things were the same! How amazing is that. Some things were vastly different though too.

This week our music lesson was jam packed! We began our new unit where we will learn all about the Friendship Song. To begin with, we listened to the lyrics of this song and discussed with our partners if we thought the song told a story. We were split on that one. As a class we listed the instruments we could hear. We learnt the person who sings the song is called a vocalist and a person's voice is also an instrument. Our lesson then turned very active! We followed the actions of our onscreen characters by moving to the pulse. Next, we moved on to warm our vocals up. Lastly, we sang the first two verses and the chorus. We think we are going to really enjoy learning all about the Friendship Song. For your P.E news, make sure you check out Mrs Jenkins' post.

Finally, we finished the week off with our well-being activity, heartsmart and computing. For our well being activity, we thought about the things we are good at. It was lovely to hear about all the things you have achieved. We then moved onto writing about the things we would like to learn about. You have set yourself some amazing targets. This linked beautifully to our HeartSmart lesson because our lesson this week was all about how unique and wonderful each one of us is. In Computing, we learnt how to create loops which was a tricky job, but you worked hard and you have started to master it. Well done.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend,

Miss p