Welcome to Year 2!

What a fabulous start to the year the children have made. The adults in Year 2 have been so impressed by the sensible behaviour and learning effort being made in the first 7 days of the school year.

In English, the children have been exploring the traditional tale “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”. We have retold the story and then explored exciting vocabulary to describe the troll. Ask your children all about the words ‘stubborn’, ‘monstrous’ and ‘sly’ and see if they can explain what they mean!

In maths, we have been really thinking about numbers and the number system. The children have been representing numbers using a range of tools such as numicon, dienes and place value counters, and have been demonstrating their understanding of what each digit is worth.

This term our topic is ‘This way or that way’ and we will be learning about countries, oceans and continents. We will share more about our learning over the course of the term.

In science, we are learning about living things and their habitats. This week we developed our scientific thinking by sorting items in different ways, then identifying which were alive and not alive. We discovered that living things all breathe, grow, move and reproduce.

We would like to just remind you that our welcome meeting will be at on Thursday 16^th September at 4pm. We look forward to seeing you then.

On Friday we celebrated our whole school carnival. We very much enjoyed learning and performing our kenyan song ‘Jambo Bwana’. We played instrumentals to go along with the rhythm of the song. As you can see in our photos below, we created our own Massai masks, Kenyan flags and decorated our own banners to bring the carnival to life.

1. We have been combining our knowledge of  2D shapes to design tribal African  masks. We had to ensure that we chose shapes to match the criteria given. 

We’ve had an incredibly fun week at school especially during our Sports Day on Tuesday morning. Children participated in a carousel of activities where they had to score as many points as possible!

Congratulations to YELLOW team who came in first place!

Children then took part in running races against each other. All the children were great sports and cheered each other on enthusiastically! Congratulations to the children who came 1st, 2nd and 3rd place overall in their races. 

We have been having a very creative day in school and have been making our habitat dioramas. We have used our designs to make 3d models. the final pictues will be added soon but for now, here is our work in progress update! 

This week we celebrated our Liturgy together with the theme of Pentecost, marking it as the birthday of the Church.  And, as with any birthday celebration, there were balloons, banners and party games during the liturgy, in this case pass the parcel.  As each layer was unwrapped, a different gift of the Holy Spirit was revealed and shared with the children.

This week we enjoyed a drama workshop with the company ‘Perform’. We went on an adventure under the sea and were able to explore different movements whilst being octopi, starfish and stingrays! The children were able to move to the music and had the opportunity to work in groups.

Computing 

In Computing we have been using Scratch to create and debug simple programs. The children followed their plan, ‘I am Special’, to help create their own avatar, or to paint their own Sprite.

We carefully considered different backgrounds to represent their personalities, likes and dislikes.

Have a look at some of our work below!

Don’t forget, the children can have a practise at this at home by visiting https://scratch.mit.edu/

Then click on ‘Create’ at the top. Enjoy!

Have a lovely weekend,

The Year 2 Team

Hello, you will notice that the children were sent home with their new Summer Term Reading passports this week. We are excited by the books that the children will read and we have ensured that the options for books suggested are wide enough. Mrs Porter has updated her shelves in the library with lots of books that the children can choose from.

Click below to download an additional copy.

Summer Term Reading Passport

Once your child has completed the passport, please send it into school so that they can be added into the prize draw for a special treat!

This afternoon, we were visited in school by Lee Haywood who you may know as our local contact for online safety. He spoke with the children about being safe with the internet in the home. He spoke with the children about smart devices such as an Alexa and using Siri and how to use them safely.

He spoke to the children about the appropriateness of the games that they play and how we are reliant on the Internet. We discussed how to stay safe on games when there is an option for chatting or communicating through games and what a stranger is. Please do look at his website as it does advise about individual games that your children may ask to play and their suitability.

https://www.onlinesafetyuk.com/advice-for-parents/