Year 2 Weekly News

Our first full week back together has been full of new learning and lots of fun. I can’t wait to tell you all about it.

In English, we received a letter from the giant (who wasn’t impressed that we’d been writing mean descriptions about him). He told us that he was going to play tricks on us all week. We spent our English time learning the Jack and the Beanstalk story through actions and thought about our targets through a series of short burst writes. This included adjective work, punctuation checks and sectioning our work up into different paragraphs. The giant grew beanstalks and chopped them down and he chucked green beans all around our room, naughty giant! We will begin to plan our own versions of the story next week.

We also spent time working on our joined handwriting. We looked specifically at the arm joins this week. You were all fantastic at swishing your arm join to touch the next letter.

In reading, we changed our challenge books and got underway with phonics and steps to read. During steps to read, we were able to look at a series of poems and use inference to think about a range of different questions.

In Maths, we continued our new unit on division. We were able to use our knowledge of multiplication to help us and learnt the phrase, “inverse operation”. We can use this to check our answers. We moved onto dividing by 2,5 and 10. Well done, everyone!

We also started our fluency sessions this week. We completed a range of questions using our methods and quick fire responses. We used the shark fin method, mental maths, column method and rapid times tables to help us this week.

During our first MyHappyMind session, we looked at our new focus all about “Appreciate”. We thought about what this meant and all the ways we can appreciate other people. We journalled our ideas with some fantastic responses from the children including pictures of who they appreciate in their lives.

In PSHE, we started our new unit all about “Too Much Selfie isn’t Healthy”. We recapped the Power Play button and remembered being Heartsmart is all about thinking about yourself, as well as others. We talked about how we must give more than we take. Love your neighbour as yourself. Mark 12:31

In R.E this week, we discussed our new BIG question all about salvation and how stories in the bible link to this. We discussed the word salvation and quickly thought about the word saviour. From this, we thought about who or what a saviour might be. We spoke about saviours in our world today: police, NHS, lifeguards etc We then were given a picture of a man in a boat going through stormy seas. As we built the picture with oil pastels, pencil and watercolours we thought about what the story could be about. Who was the man? Why were they in a boat? Who was being saved? We will explore the story in more detail next week.

We were a bit surprised in music this week as our focus song had no lyrics! We found the piece of music to be fast making us think of a chase happening. In our music books, we drew pictures showing our thoughts. We then chose one adjective to describe the music and explained why we chose it.

In Art, we continued to explore sculpture. This week saw us build upon our play dough work from last week as we brought out the clay. We use a range of techniques this week to mould, sculpt and transform our clay into different shapes and sizes. On Friday, we used tools to draw fine lines on our clay designs. Well done, team!

During Forest School this week, Mr Hadfields made links to our topic of farming. We talked all about early man/woman and how they used to farm. We also role played being birds, building nests and hunting for food. We finished our sessions by lighting our own fires and roasting marshmellows – what a fantastic session!

In Geography, we continued to think about seasons and weather. We created our own seasons posters full of facts about weather symbols, the months of the year and the different weathers within the seasons. Well done!

In Computing, we completed lesson 5 of our coding journeys. This week saw us complete a series of levels based on building algorithms and debugging. You use coding blocks to code your sprite to move in different directions.

We also started our new French learning this week. We read the book, A Walk in Paris, and learnt some new French words such as how to say hello, please, thank you and goodbye. We then spent time counting to 5. A great start team!

Have a lovely weekend,

Mr Dale