Leaping Along in Our Learning

The Year 2 children have been learning about writing formal and informal letters. The children received a letter from Goldilocks, who desperately needed their help to make things right with the Three Bears. Each child wrote a letter to The Bear Family, trying their best to persuade the Bears that Year 2 are here to help and will keep Goldilocks on her best behaviour. They have been learning about the different elements of a letter, putting their knowledge to work when they planned and wrote a postcard to a relative/friend about their time in Year 2 so far. The improvement in their ability to work independently is phenomenal, as well as their letter formation.

Last week, during Assembly, Mrs Gould led a draw-a-long where the children had to draw a cubist piece of artwork. As a result of this, the children grew extremely excited about cubism so we decided to link our learning about the Gunpowder Plot and Guy Fawkes to Cubism by giving the children an opportunity to paint a cubist version of Guy Fawkes. The children enjoyed using different shapes and bright colours in their paintings.

Outdoor Maths is becoming a fast favourite lesson in Year 2. We have taken our learning about partitioning numbers as well as representing numbers and number facts differently outside. The children looked around to find leaves, pebbles, sticks and cronuts to help them represent numbers. Their creativity was wonderful to see as well as how their knowledge of numbers has just gone from strength to strength.

The children have been diving into the Gunpowder Plot in History. They have been following along with the Plotters’ plans and learnt that Guy Fawkes and the King did not behave in the correct way, not accepting each other's different beliefs. The conversations that have been had in Year 2 have been wonderful. We ended our learning this week thinking about how the Plotters hid the gunpowder in the cellar. The Year 2’s think that they covered it or painted it in order to camouflage the barrels. We will see if they are correct next week. The Year 2’s got creative by making Plotter masks and got to pretend to be one of the Plotters, saying something that they think their plotter would have said. They loved their masks and ran around capturing the Guy Fawkes’, putting him in jail.

As it was Halloween this week, another fun piece of Art that the children got to create was a leaf ghost. They used PVA glue to cover a leaf and placed some wool for the eyes and mouth. Once it had dried, they peeled off the glue, which created a leaf shaped ‘ghost’ that got stuck to our windows to make Year 2 a little more spooky, to fit in with the spooky season!

There was a very exciting moment last week in Year 2... our worms were able to produce their first lot of WORM JUICE! We couldn’t believe it. The worm juice did not smell good, but it is such a wonderful fertiliser for the soil and for plants. We took some of the worm juice, diluted it slightly with water and then poured it on the roots of the plants in the garden outside the Year 3 classrooms.

Practice for the Year 1 & 2 Nativity Play is in full swing. The children have found out which role they will play in the performance. They had a Music session where they listened to all of the songs that they will be singing and learned some of the dance moves. Throughout the next few weeks, we will be continuing to practise and learn the songs. In Art, the children will be tasked with decorating the sleigh that the reindeer will pull, as well as make some stars that will be used as part of the backdrop.