Welcome to our Year 2 blog

Come here for weekly updates.

Week Beginning 6th March

It's been another busy week here in Year 2. The children have done some excellent writing in which they focused on using a range of suffixes (-less, -ment, -ful, -ly, -ness). We enjoyed reading 'I Can Catch a Monster' by Beth Woollvin so much that we decided to write a retelling of it, showcasing all the skills we have learnt so far in Year 2. All of the Year 2 teachers were really impressed with what was produced. Some of us have even started joining our handwriting!

In Maths, we have been learning to identify 3D shapes and describe their properties, including edges, faces and vertices. The children coped really well with all the new vocabulary and were experts by the end of the week! Next week we will be learning about money so any work on coin recognition and making different totals at home would be really useful. 

In PSHE, we learnt about the UN Rights of the Child and explored which of the articles on it are relevant to life in school. We will be doing further work on these this half term and will eventually use our learning to generate a 'Rights Respecting Charter' for our class, helping us to ensure that we are not only receiving our rights in school, but are also respecting the rights of others. It was a great opportunity to revisit the key Taking Care Project message: 'We all have the right to feel safe all the time.'

Finally, in Geography we have been learning the correct vocabularly to descibe physical features and have grouped them based on whether they are a landform, body of water or vegetataion. 

Week Beginning 27th February

This week was World Book Week so we spent much of the week enjoying books and carrying out exciting activities linked to reading. The whole-school had a real focus on poetry throughout the week and each class wrote a collaborative poem on the theme of sustainability which they shared at the 'Poetry Slam' on Friday afternoon. The Year 2 poems were all about plastic pollution, following our learning before half term. All three classes performed their poems beautifully and really spread the message about taking care of our planet. The children worked really hard to present their poems beautifully and these will soon be displayed around school for everyone to enjoy. Earlier in the week, to inspire our poems, we were lucky to take part in a workshop with a visiting poet, Claire Culliford. We had a brilliant time finding out how she writes her poetry and we got lots of top tips!

On World Book Day itself, we all enjoyed coming into school dressed as one of our favourite book charaters. We had a teacher swap with another class and their teacher came to read us some stories. We were also very excited to take part in a book exchange: we all brought in a book and swapped it for one we hadn't read before. It was lovely to be introduced to some new texts.

Spring 1 - Blue Planet Learning Theme

Our exciting 'Blue Planet' learning theme gave us an insight into the weird and wonderful creatures that live deep down in the world's oceans. We started our Geography unit by making sure we could all name and locate the world's five main oceans. We then learnt about how humans are damaging the oceans due to the amount of plastic we are using. Although plastic is a cheap and efficient material to make a whole host of items we use everyday, it is harming our oceans and the marine life that lives in them. Plastic can take over 450 years to bio-degrade and 8 million tonnes of it ends up in our oceans every year! Plastic waste traps animals, some eat it by accident and it also contaminates human food supplies (as we eat the fish who have eaten the waste). To spread the word about what people can do to reduce plastic pollution, we created sea creatures made from recycled materials to go on a display in each of our classrooms, along with information about how people could help. We also designed posters about plastic pollution and learnt about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the Pacific Ocean that is full of plastic waste thanks to the ocean currents. We also did a litter survey in our playground to see what material we found the most of - we were all shocked about how much plastic we found! We even learnt to draw a bar graph to present our findings. 

Following the theme of recycling, we were really excited to have Creaturama visit us in school to deliver workshops about how to make incredible 3D models, all made from recycled materials. All of KS1 created their very own sea creature sculpture made from waste items such as plastic bottles and cereal boxes, all covered in newspaper and painted to make them look incredibly professional! In Art Lessons, we also looked at the sculptures of Giaccometti and used them to inspire our very own clay sea creature sculpture. 

In English this half term, we have been working hard to expand the range of conjunctions we use to extend our sentences and also to write accurately in the past tense, including irregular past tense verbs. We wrote our own version of the Angler Fish Chase Scene in Finding Nemo and tried hard to use a range of descriptive vocabulary to make our writing exciting. We also leant how to use apostrophes for contraction and possession. 

Our Music work this half term also linked to Finding Nemo. We started by listening to a range of tuned and untuned percussion instruments and we talked about how the timbre of each one could be used to represent different sea creatures. We then looked at the use of dynamics and tempo to change the mood of a piece of music. The unit culminated in us composing a group piece of music to accompany the Angler Fish scene from Finding Nemo. We even created a group graphic score to remind us when to play each instrument.

We are incredibly proud of our brilliant ocean topic book covers. We used tints and shades of blue to give the impression of depth under the ocean and than carefully cut black silhouettes of sea creatures to stick over the top so it looks as if we are looking up from the bottom of the ocean. 

Recently, it was Children's Mental Health Week and we loved having a yoga teacher come in for the morning to teach us some yoga and other mindfulness strategies that we can use to help us regulate our emotions. We used the story 'The Invisible String' which we have also been looking at in PSHE lessons. 

Our Maths work this half term has centred on ensuring that we are confident when using pictorial methods for all four operations, including when crossing ten for addition and subtraction. 

We have had a brilliant half term and are very excited about our new 'How to Train your Dragon' theme when we return after half term. 

Week Beginning 5.12.22

This week has been our last normal week before all of Year Two’s Christmas fun starts! We have worked very hard and done lots of great learning including work on fractions in maths and written some information texts in English. On Monday, we had a very exciting visitor come into school. Father Christmas came in to see us with two of his elves. He read us a story and we all got given a gift. See the photos below from our exciting visitor.

Week Beginning 28.11.22

This week has been very busy in Year 2. We have been learning about the Great Fire of Warwick and some of us have been on  a walk around Warwick to learn about the fire with Mrs Pope. In our History lessons we will be learning about this some more. In Maths, we have been learning about fractions. We had a very exciting lesson learning about halves using jaffa cakes, chocolate and play dough to represent half of different shapes. We have begun some brilliant writing based on the book called The Firebird. We are going to be writing our own non-fiction texts based on this interesting and exciting bird!

Week Beginning 7.11.22

This week Year 2 we have been very busy. We have made our topic book covers for our new learning theme and they look amazing! We collaged red, yellow and orange tissue paper onto our background to look like flames and then cut out a silhouette of London’s skyline to recreate the Great Fire of London. Have a look at some examples below. In Maths, we have been learning about division. We have talked about the different symbols, key words and method and solved lots of tricky word problems. In Computing, we have been learning about algorithms and debugging. We started to create our own algorithms for BeeBots. In our English lessons we have enjoyed learning about poetry and have created some of our very own found poems.

Week Beginning 1.11.22

This week we started our new learning theme called Flames and Fireworks. We are very excited about this topic and have lots of new things to explore and learn! In our English lessons we have been retelling the story of How the Elephant Got his Trunk and writing this as an extended piece of writing including all our skills we learnt before half term including expanded noun phrases and conjunctions. In RE we have began learning about Hinduism and asked some questions about the religion which we will find out the answers to as we explore our RE topic further. In History, we have been learning about Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot and are all very excited to see some fireworks in real life at the weekend!

Week Beginning 17.10.22

This week in Year Two has been extremely busy! All the classes have been planning, cooking and evaluating their Jollof Rice this week. We all enjoyed cooking the rice dish and we practised using the bridge method of chopping to safely cut all of our vegetables up. Once we had chopped everything up we began to cook our vegetables, rice chickpeas and add our sauce and spices. Some of us were a little apprehensive to try the rice but we all were brave and tasted what we had cooked and most of us really enjoyed eating it! We have put the recipe on Google Classroom in case you would like to make this at home over half term.

Thank you to all the parents and carers that came to our reading Come and Learn sessions this week. We really enjoyed having you in school to demonstrate the key skills in reading and developing comprehension. We hope you enjoyed your trip into school and it was a useful experience.

We also had our Harvest Festival this week. On Wednesday morning, all of Year Two took part in the Harvest Festival assembly singing the songs we had learnt and been practising as well as listening to a talk from our local church reverend Kevin about the meaning of harvest.

On Thursday after school, some of the children in the eco and charity committee helped organise and run a pumpkin event in school to raise money.

Week Beginning 10.10.22

This week has been very exciting! On Wednesday Year 2 had their Awesome Africa theme day. They were very lucky to have some special visitors come in to teach African drumming and African dance. The drumming was very loud (!) but the children were all experts by the end. Year 2 were taught about the importance of drumming in how people communicate and how to work together to create a rhythm. During the dance workshop, children were exploring the story of the Harvest, and told a story of a boy catching a fish through dance. This got everyone ready for the Harvest Festival next week! 

Week Beginning 3.10.22

In Year Two this week we have had lots of exciting opportunities to learn new things. In our science we have started learning about food chains, we spoke about the different animals and what we thought they would like to eat and then tried to organise these into food chains. We learnt that the arrow shows the transfer of energy in a food chain.

We have also continued with our Adinkra Artwork. 2RS have started printing their designs onto fabric. We enjoyed doing this and first had a practise in our sketch books. Look out for an exciting display of our artwork around school soon!

In Geography we recapped what human and physical features are. We then tried to place different features on a map of Africa in the correct place.

In Maths, we have continued our learning on place value and partitioning this week.

Week Beginning 26.9.22

This week we have been learning some more about Adinkra Artwork and we have made our very own Adinkra stamps. We will use these next week to print patterns onto calico fabric which we will display in school. It was quite messy, we used string, PVA glue and cardboard to create our own stamps. We had to ensure that we used enough glue to stick the string down properly so it doesn't come off when we stamp it next week.

In maths we have been practising our skills in addition and subtraction where the calculations are all mixed up. We had to carefully ensure we circled the symbol and worked out our calculation very carefully. We have been learning about different sentence types in English and have learnt about questions, exclamations, statements and commands.

Week Beginning 19.9.22

This week in Y2 we have been learning about verbs in our English lessons. We now know lots of different types of words including: verbs, nouns (proper nouns) and adjectives. We have even learnt about past tense verbs and how to change a verb into the past tense. In our maths we have been learning how to subtraction using dienes this week. We have been learning about habitats in science. This week was very exciting because we went on a habitat walk around school to search for micro habitats. We looked under rocks, under logs, in the grass and in the mud to find different insects that live in micro habitats around school.

Week Beginning 12.9.22

This week we have been learning about addition in maths. We have used the dienes to help us practically make the numbers and calculate our answers and then moved on to pictorially drawing our calculations in our books by drawing the dienes underneath each calculation. In English we have been learning about nouns and adjectives, we have been exploring the different types of nouns including names of people, places, things, animals and abstract nouns. We have then worked hard to combine nouns and adjectives to create some expanded noun phrases to describe different African animals. On Friday afternoon 2RS were very lucky to have Steve in to do some tennis coaching. We really enjoyed learning the basics about tennis and all having a go.

Week Beginning 6.9.22

Welcome to the Year 2 blog. What a busy first week we have had at school! We have been getting used to the way things work in Year 2, learning new routines, getting to know our teachers and are now the oldest children in KS1! We feel very grown up.