Advent Term

Autumn Term Curriculum Vehicle

Year 2's Autumn Vehicle will be 'How can I keep safe?'

This vehicle will encourage children to think about their safety and the safety of those around them. Children will learn to look for and evaluate hazards and risks and will be able to think of ways to tackle them to ensure their safety. Children will be considering things such as; online safety, fire safety, emotional wellbeing and their own safety within the school and wider environment. 

Whilst this vehicle is broad and encompasses a range of themes, it also has links to children's autumn curriculum learning too. It has links to children's history learning (the Great Fire of London), their PSHE topics, science, computing and DT topics. 

 A lovely time getting into the Christmas spirit this afternoon (Oh yes we did!). We were very lucky to be able to watch Aladdin for this year’s pantomime. We all thought we knew the story, but there were some additions and some twists and turns to the usual story in this pantomime! We all loved it and some of us even got to met the characters! 🧞‍♂️ 

In PE today, we were learning to balance on our bottoms. Whilst we all had a good laugh at Miss Evans explaining and showing us what to do, we found it tricky to start with! We then made it more difficult by listing up a cone on one of our sides to make sure our tummy muscles were engaged. Then, Miss Evans made it even trickier by asking us to pass the cones over from one side to the other with the same hand! This is a very important skill for all children to learn as crossing their midline helps with many gross and fine motor skills such as writing, brushing our teeth, getting dressed and even walking!

We conducted lots of experiments to see which shapes were the strongest. We had to see which was the most stable by seeing which one would move the least when at an angle and then we had to make the shapes out of card and see how many books it could hold. We decided that cylinders were the strongest because they have the least vertices and therefore are not likely to buckle under weight.

Today, we conducted our science experiment. We had to test which material would make the best boat. We decided the best way to do this would be to see which material would hold the most coins. Abdullah helped us with the design of his metal boat, he said that the bigger the boat, the more coins it would hold because they are spread out evenly! Our results showed that metal made the best boat because it successfully held the most coins whilst still floating.

Year 2 created some lovely projects to celebrate Black History Month. We were very proud to put them on display for parents to see last week. Well done for all of your hard work Year 2 🖍️🖊️

We have been using viewfinders in art to focus in on texture. We know that Van Gogh used bold brushstrokes to create texture in his paintings and we know that texture means the way something feels. We looked at the textures in the painting ‘Starry Night’ and then looked around the classroom to find different textures before drawing these in our art books. 🔲👀⭐️

This is what our English lessons have looked like recently! We are using maths resources to help us break down and reconstruct sentences. We have been learning to identify subjects, verbs and everything else and then figure out where the full stops go. We are absolutely smashing it and are really applying our prior learning of verbs, nouns and conjunctions. 📝🔵

In Whole Class Reading, we used dictionaries for the first time to find out what new vocabulary means. We struggled to understand how they worked at first, but after a bit of practice, you can see we were hard at work! 📚📖

Today, we held our prayer assembly for the whole school and parent visitors. It was about our Class Saint, Saint Lucy. The children wrote the script, picked their parts and then even chose a hymn to sing at the end of the assembly. Miss Evans is so proud of us for our confidence and independence. Well done Year 2!✝️

Today, we had a visit from a fire engine to fit with our Autumn Term vehicle of ‘How can I keep safe?’. They answered questions we had about what different tools were for, where they got the water from to put fires out and what else they did when they aren’t fighting fires. They also talked to us about how different their tools are now than they would have been during the Great Fire of London - this really helped us to understand why it was so hard to put the fire out! The firefighters then let us go into the fire engine and then use their hose! 🚒🔥💦

Today, Year 2 were contacted by Humpty Dumpty, who asked for help! 🥚 

Humpty asked the children to find the best material to make his clothes so that when he fell off the wall, he wouldn’t break and wouldn’t need repairing by the King’s men.

The children worked in groups and had different materials to wrap and egg in (it was hard boiled!😅). They had to drop the egg from a height to see which material protected their egg the best.

We welcomed our grown ups in today to see our skills in DT! the children showcased their designs for their pouches and then sewed them together with the support of their grown ups. It was lovely to see the children changing and adapting their designs and adding things like fastenings too. Well done children’s new well done grown ups! 🪡🧵

We had great fun in maths today using Base 10 to represent big numbers! We have found them really useful when thinking about numbers to 100, they have really helped us clearly see then tens and ones in numbers.

This week in PE, we have practiced different balances. We were finding it tricky to start with but Miss Evans told us that if we look at something still, it makes it easier! Owen also taught us another trick - if you hold your ear, you don't wobble! We then played a game of mirrors, where we had to copy the balance our partners did.

Key Stage 1 have been signed up to a new NCETM initiative called 'Mastering Number'. As part of this, we have been sent some rekenreks to help us understand numbers and their make-up in greater depths. We were introduced to them today and Miss Evans showed us how to use them. As you can see by our faces, we were delighted! We can't wait to start the rest of the lessons!

Today in art, we have been working on our observational drawing skills. Miss Evans bought some sunflowers for us to study and draw whilst thinking about Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers'. We now know that it took 2 years to paint (1888 and 1889), Van Gogh painted 5 canvasses of sunflowers, and that it was painted in the south of France. We really enjoyed today's lesson and all concentrated very hard - Miss Evans has never heard us so quiet!  We then left our books open on our tables and went for a walk around the classroom to have a look at our friends' work and give them positive and encouraging feedback.

Today, we invited our grown ups in for our Learn Together session. We showed off our sewing skills to finish our pouches. 

Amelia - "I loved it, can we sew some more?"

Edith - "I can't wait to sew some more, I want to sew my puppet that we made last year!"

Filip - "Can I decorate it? I want to put a button on it!"

Today, in science we conducted an experiment into what material would be best for Humpty Dumpty’s clothes. Miss Evans got an email from him asking the children to find out what clothes would stop him from breaking and having to be out back together by the King’s men when he fell off the wall. We found that the strongest materials were the best to stop him from breaking, but that these weren’t the most comfortable materials to make clothes out of. 

Year 2 went on a verb hunt on Monday! They searched the classroom to find action and being verbs and had to record them in the correct column. We are moving on to irregular verbs next 💬