Year 2 News: 21.1.22

Another brilliant week has passed us by in Year 2. Everyone has once again worked incredibly hard and we’ve had lots of fun throughout the week as well. This week we have been coders, artists and bar modelling experts

In Reading and Phonics we continued to recap key sounds, spellings and practised our comprehension skills. We also continued to leave lots of book reviews – a fantastic effort!

In English this week, we continued our T4W unit. We recapped the final parts of our story and read it aloud, complete with actions of course. From this, we were able to create a writing toolkit as a class. The toolkit was filled with all the things we should be including in our shared write. We then boxed up our model text and planned our new stories including new characters and villains. We then got to work writing our stories, whilst also focusing upon our neat handwriting. The stories turned out fantastically well and we even learnt a new editing game. We got into groups of three and helped each other to edit with our green pens. Next week will see us complete our hot writes; I can’t wait to read them!

In Maths, we continued our unit on multiplication and division. We have had a big focus on division and how we can use bar models to help us this week. We ensured we knew which bits of a division sentence were the whole, parts and answer. We completed a series of bar model questions and by the end of the week, we were able to create our own. Fantastic work, Year 2!

In Art, we continued our investigations into the artist, Vincent Van Gogh and his Starry Night artwork. We put the finishing touches to our recreations and ensured we used a range of oil pastel techniques, from blending to long strokes. They all look great and next week will see us adapt his artwork and create our own versions. We spent part of our lesson looking at space books to see which colours we might want to use. Whilst doing this we also thought about what techniques we might use to create things like galaxy swirls and speckled stars in our artwork.

In History, we continued our unit all about the space race and famous astronaut, Neil Armstrong. We learnt all about living memory this week and just what that means. We learnt that living memories are to do with your lifetime and that some people have longer living memories because they are older. We also found out that things have happened beyond our living memories such as the birth of Jesus and the dinosaurs. We will use this to help us with our timeline work next week as we explore the Space Race.

In Computing, we completed our final project on our coding journey. We used all the skills we’ve learnt so far to programme a sprite to perform certain actions. We managed to build an algorithm in which we used skills such as loops, debugging and efficient coding methods. They were fantastic and so fun to do! We will enter a new coding journey as we take on the next step of our learning.

In French, we recapped our knowledge of numbers to 10. We played games and sang songs to recap the numbers we have learnt so far. We then spent time learning some French colours. It was great to hear your pronunciation and see the smiles on your face when you were doing this.

We also spent time taking part in a number of worships throughout the week. Our favourite was where we thought about “Is it ever fair to judge others on their appearance?”. We had some really grown up responses and a great debate.

In R.E, we continued our brand new BIG question of “Why did Jesus teach his disciples to pray the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Your kingdom come?" We recapped what we thought God’s Kingdom meant to us. We then focused upon the values that Christians beleive to be apart of God’s Kingdom. We looked at pictures at discussed valuers such as helpfulness, truth, faith and forgiveness. From this, we played a game! Rolling a dice gave us the number of the value we would discuss in our teams. I heard some fantastic responseS such as, “Truth is an important value of God’s Kingdom because without truth there can’t be friendship.” We finished by thinking about which value was most important to us. Some of us picked faith whilst others picked courage. What a brilliant lesson we all had!

Lumps and bumps! Our new space song tells us all about the planets in the solar system. When we looked at the song lyrics, we could see the descriptive words in each verse. We underlined the key adjectives and thought of ways we could sing adding emphasis on these words. This then directed the performance to focus on the song facts. We also learnt our song is a lively waltz and has a slow tempo. Our first practise of singing Lumps and Bumps was really good! After listening back to our performance, we noticed that during the middle of the song, we sang a lot quieter. We weren’t sure why we did this, but next week, we will be more aware of keeping our volume at a consistent level.

Our courageous advocacy aim of stopping littering once and for all also got back underway this week. We have had a delivery of 16 litter pickers and some hi-vis jackets. We have created a litter picking timetable so that each playtime and lunchtime there are 5 litter pickers on duty to ensure our playground is kept tidy,

We also said goodbye to Miss Hewitt this week. We will miss her very much as she goes onto her next placement and we wish her lots of luck! We made her a huge card and gave her lots of chocolate as a thank you for helping us.

Have a lovely weekend,

Mr Dale