Year 2 News: 21.05.21

This week in Year 2 we have been busy bees once again. We have been poets, scientists and much more.

For English this week, we got to be rule breakers! It was lots of fun. Why did we get to break the rules? It was because we were doing poetry. This meant we didn't have to follow the normal rules of English as we didn't have to write in full sentences! Instead, we had to follow the pattern of a poem. We based our work around Roger McGough's 'The Sound Collector'. We went on a sound collecting walk and wrote down all the different things we could hear around school. Then we looked at the sounds and worked hard to find rhyming patterns. Finally, we followed the structure of the original 'The Sound Collector' to create our own school-based version.

In maths this week, we continued with our work on fractions. We have been learning more about halves and quarters. We have also been busy doing some investigating, and we have worked out that a half is the same as two quarters.

In our afternoon lessons this week, we started the week off with R.E. and history. In R.E, we focused once again on the Holy Spirit. Our previous lessons have taught us that specific symbols are used to represent the Holy Spirit. This week, we focused on the symbols water, wind, fire and a dove and voted to determine which symbol we thought best represented the Holy Spirit. After an initial vote, we shared our ideas which allowed your understanding of how these symbols related to God to shine through. People then got chance to vote again. Many of you presented such great arguments that your classmates changed their minds. It was lovely to listen to you share your ideas and reasoning. Well done team!

In history, we continued looking at Stone Age tools. We rated the different tools and weapons on their usefulness and deadliness! We realised that many of the tools were very deadly which was important because during the old and middle Stone Age era people had to hunt to survive. In the lesson, we also painted the tools that we made from clay last week.

On Tuesday, our afternoon lesson was all about Geography. We learnt about the difference between physical and human geography. We then looked at a picture and identified human features and physical features. You all did a great job. Well done.

On Wednesday, we began another Study Work page. In this lesson, we had to use our careful water colouring skills to paint different fruits. This is because our next page is going to be all about the D.T lessons where we designed and made our own fruit salads. After study work, we moved onto Science. We watched a clip from 'Deadly 60' to see how different animals are designed to survive in their environment. We then drew our favourite animal and wrote down all the ways that we thought it is designed to survive in it's environment.

On Thursday, you had P.E with Mrs Jenkins and Music with Miss Holland. For our music lesson this week, you worked together to stay in sync when playing open strings and chord C. It was quite tricky, but you tried hard. We played My Dog Has Fleas and A Sailor Went To Sea. For all the P.E news, be sure to check of Mrs Jenkin's P.E news update.

Finally, we finished the week off with Wellbeing, Heartsmart and computing. In our well-being session, we focused on being still. We listened to the world around us and focused on our breathing. We then learnt a breathing technique where we used our hands to help us stay focused on our breathing. During Heartsmart, we talked about all the different things we have learnt in our unit 'Don't Rub It In, Rub it Out'. We talked about what anger can feel like and what can cause us to get angry. Some of you shared situations when you felt angry. Thank you for sharing. Thanks to many of you sharing, we realised that it is normal to feel angry and that many of us get angry over the same things. Our discussion then moved on to talk about how we can calm ourselves down when we feel like this. You all had so many great suggestions. I was enormously proud of you all. In computing, we completed another coding lesson. You created algorithms once again, but this time things were getting a little trickier. This meant you had to be resilient and work hard to problem solve. Did you know that in Computing, problem solving is called 'De-bugging'?

I hope you are all having a wonderful weekend,

Miss p