Year Two newsletter 17.01.25

What a super first whole week back we have had Year Two.

In English, you have worked incredibly hard on immersing yourself into the story of the Bog Baby. We spent a lot of time this week focusing on the setting of Bluebell woods. You wrote a beautiful setting description thinking about how you could use similes, expanded noun phrases and adjectives ending in -ful or -less. We moved on to analysing our example text towards the end of the week thinking about the language and grammar that they use. We used our highlighting of the text to fill in our writer’s knowledge.

In steps to read, we focused on the story of the ‘tattered shoes’. You learnt lots of new vocabulary through the story and answered comprehension questions on the story each day. Well done team!

In maths, you have been working hard on finishing your shapes unit. You have had a focus on 3D shapes and how many vertices, edges and faces these 3D shapes have. You then built upon this learning to then sort them into groups or create patterns with them! Well done team.

In RE, you focused on the question ‘Why did Jesus welcome everyone’. You thought about your friends and who you welcome each day. You then thought about who Jesus was friends with. We then realised that Jesus saw everyone as a friend and that he liked to welcome everyone into God’s kingdom. We saw an example of this through the biblical story of ‘Jesus welcoming the children’. You saw how Jesus’ disciples did not think very much of children and didn’t believe they were important enough to be blessed by Jesus. However, Jesus was horrified by what his disciples were doing and said ‘Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.’ Mathew 19:13. This meant that everyone was important to Jesus and everyone belonged to the kingdom of God and deserved to be blessed. You created some beautiful artwork about this and wrote some descriptive words to describe Jesus at this point.

In our courageous advocacy work, you are on your journey of becoming leaders of kindness. You used a biblical story this week to show kindness. You listened beautifully to the story of ‘The paralysed man’ and you answered some ‘I wonder’ questions about what happened and how people were feeling. We thought carefully about how the man’s friends showed kindness because they did everything they possibly could to get their paralysed friend to Jesus so he could be healed. You even filled your kindness jar this week so you could get your time on the adventure playground. Well done superstars!

In history this week, you thought carefully about what farming looked like in the Stone Age. From our previous lesson we had found out that farming was introduced in the Stone Age. You looked how the Hunter-gatherers changed to farmers because they wanted to stay in one place instead of moving around all of the time. You watched a fantastic animation clip to show this significant change. You then found out what Stone Age farmers grew on their land, what animals they kept and what tools they used. You found this very interesting!

In PHSE this week you looked at ‘being selfie isn’t healthy’ and what this means. You watched a video of Boris talking through this and giving examples. You found out that it’s important to not just think about yourself all of the time but to focus on the environment around you and to focus on other people’s feelings. It is important to give empathy towards others.

Continuing to work on our band work, we used this week’s music lesson to work hard at learning the words to our ‘Be in a Band’ song. We recapped the differences in the choruses and a few of us were given our jobs of introducing a few of our verse lines.

Today's lesson focus was about communicating well as a team to help defend against attackers. When playing a game of 'Defend my Friend,' year 2 noticed that the most successful defenders were those that were communicating and not just pulling and pushing their friends around the circle.

After working on some underarm throwing and catching, the children were then placed in teams to play a catching game against each other. They had to work together to get all of their team back into their house by passing underarm and catching before the balls hit the floor. They worked hard on developing their skills and challenging each other as they improved, realising that to cathch a small ball, they needed to be ready with their hands close together (touching at the wrists) ready to snatch them shut over the ball.

In computing you looked at algorithms and what they are. You understood that an algorithm was a list of clear instructions that you give to a computer to make it do something. We looked at how we can give our friends clear instructions to move around the room. You looked at a beebot and thought carefully about the instructions you can give it to make it move from one place to another. We looked at the instructions of ‘forward, backward, left turn and right turn’. You were super at giving these instructions and understanding where you may have made a mistake.

In science, we started our new unit of living things and their habitats. You did amazing at understanding how we know something is living. We looked at the acronym ‘Mrs Gren ’ and what it stands for. You used this to create a poster for your science books so that you could always understand what makes something living!

In art, you finished off your beautiful clay Stone Age farming tools by painting them! I can’t wait to now display these in our classroom. They look very realistic.

What a busy but super week we have had Year Two.

Have a lovely weekend,

Miss Haynes