It’s been an exciting term so far in Year 2.  Our Blue Planet learning theme has captured everyone’s imagination and challenged the children to think about their environment and how to look after it. 

We started off by painting the front cover for our new topic books.  The children built on their knowledge of primary colours and the colour wheel by mixing 3 colours to create shades and tones.  They then added silhouettes of sea creatures to complete their pictures.    

Following this, the children compared and contrasted the artwork of Giacometti and Anthony Gormley and learnt how to explain what they liked and what they didn’t like about the sculptures.  This then helped them to first design their own sea creature sculptures and then model them in clay. 

In our Geography lessons, the children have been learning about the effect that plastic rubbish is having on our world, particularly our oceans.  They have researched one area of the Pacific Ocean now known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  Having been shocked to learn that there is an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the area, they wrote their own pledges about how they will play their part to stop this. 

Closer to home, the children went on a litter pick to St Nicholas Park.  All 3 classes used litter pickers to collect the plastic, aluminium, paper, fabric and other materials they found.  Back at school, the children used their data handling skills to record in a tally chart and then in a block graph the rubbish they found. 

Next Friday, all 3 classes will be taking part in art workshops led by Jordanna Farrimond from Artists in the Making who specialise in creating masterpieces from recycled materials.  If you have any of the following small plastic items, we would really like to use them for our artwork: lids, old toys, plastic pegs, pens, plastic cutlery, straws, small bottles, beads, jewellery and buttons.