Welcome to the Year 2 blog!

Each week, we hope to share with you some of the learning that has taken place in our busy Year 2 classrooms. Maybe you could talk about what the children have been doing at school when you are at home with them?

Friday 26th April

This term in design technology we are designing and making hand puppets. This week we learnt to tie a knot in the cotton and how to thread the cotton onto the needle. We then practised a running stitch and an over stitch ready to start sewing our puppets.

Friday 19th April

What a busy week back we have had in year 2!

In maths, we have begun to learn about weight. The children have had great fun using balance scales and kitchen scales to understand the mass of an object and how the matter inside of it will affect the weight.

In English we have been reading ‘The Paper Bag Princess’. This is an exciting story where the three characters are a princess, a prince and a mean dragon. This week we have been learning our text map and orally retelling the story, using puppets that we made. The children have also been creating story mountains and having a go at writing the story out for themselves.

In science, we have started a new topic on growing. This week we have been busy planting runner beans and we have also begun an experiment to see whether plants can survive if they don’t get one of the elements they need to thrive – ask your child if they can tell you what a plant needs to grow strong and healthy!

We started our geography topic this week by making compasses and using them to direct each other around the classroom. The children then used them to work out the answers to some direction questions on a map. They also had a look at Google Earth and we tried to find the UK, and also Jamaica, which they will be learning about this term.

Friday 15th March

On Friday we celebrated Red Nose Day in Y2. We loved the children’s outfits and crazy hair. In class we told one another funny jokes and completed different Red Nose Day activities.

Friday 8th March

This week has been an exciting one in English as we have had lots of fun activities going on for World Book Week. The children have had visits from the governors, who have been reading their favourite bedtime stories, as well as the Reading Ambassadors coming to make bookmarks with each class. We have also had an online visit all the way from New Zealand from the brilliant author of the Dave Pigeon and Bad Panda series – Swapna Haddow. She read the children one of her new stories and answered all their questions about how to become an author – we have lots of inspired children wanting to write a book of their own now!

In maths, we have begun to look at time in more detail, including quarter past and quarter to. The children made their own clocks with working hands to help support their learning with this.

We have continued our DT learning this week with the children all tasting lots of different tropical fruit to help them plan and design their own smoothies next week. They each chose their favourite and created a bar graph to show the most popular fruit in each class.

Friday 1st March

This week we have been learning all about symmetry in maths. We are creating our own question stories and asking BIG questions and have been using the Chromebooks to research animals and their habitats.

Friday 23rd February

We have been extremely busy with our learning this week. In maths we have been learning about 2D and 3D shapes. In English we have been learning about the story, Little Answer and in Design and Technology we have been tasting a range of different flavour fruit smoothies.

This week we have enjoyed lots of  learning. In maths we have been learning about unit and non-unit fractions. We used pizzas to explore halves and quarters. 

In English we have been reading the story 'The day the Crayons quit' and writing to the main character Duncan about what we would like if we were a crayon!

In History we pretended to be Florence Nightingale and wrote letters asking for more medical supplies.

Friday 26th January

We have been extremely busy with our learning this week. In maths we are continuing our work on fractions.

In English we started a new story called ‘The day the crayons quit’ where we are exploring using conjunctions and looking at how different characters are feeling.

In art we have been learning about the artist Paul Klee and his work with hot and cold colours. In Science we are starting to learn about animal habitats and in PSHE we have been talking about people who help keep us safe.

Friday 19th January

We have enjoyed acting out the different stages of Florence Nightingale’s life and challenging ourselves to complete a timeline showing this.

In Art we used our observational skills to create a portrait of her using charcoal. We particularly found it fun to include the different techniques such as ‘smudging’, ‘contour hatching’, ‘stippling’…why don’t you ask us which ones we used?

Friday 12th January

In English this week, we have been using our imagination creating junk models to turn our ‘trash into treasure.’ We are using our ideas as inspiration as we look at the picture book, ‘The girl with the Yellow bag’. We are beginning to change the setting and objects to create our own class story.

In maths, we began the year by looking at measure beginning with cubes and moving onto centimetres with accurate use of a ruler. We moved on this week to data collection and have been using tallies, pictographs and bar charts to answer questions.

We have begun a new History topic and have been introduced to ‘The Lady of the Lamp’. We made our own paper lanterns by carefully following instructions and wrote some great facts about Florence Nightingale. We are looking forward to finding out about the achievements of other famous nurses in history in the coming weeks.

Friday 5th January

We have had an exciting start to the New Year and have been using our imagination creating junk models to turn our ‘trash into treasure.’ We are using our ideas as inspiration as we look at ‘The girl with the Yellow bag’. In maths, we have begun looking at measure beginning with cubes and moving onto centimetres with accurate use of a ruler. We have begun a new History topic and have been introduced to ‘The lady of the lamp’ and have made our own paper lanterns and are looking forward to finding out about the achievements of famous nurses in history.

Friday 8th December

Things are starting to get festive in Year 2! We began the week watching the Reception children perform their nativity and reminisced on our own memories of acting out. We then eagerly welcomed our first group of parents to perform our Christmas songs and were thrilled with our first attempt at performing to an audience this year.

On top of all the festivities, our classrooms have been a hive of activity as we began learning about division through equal sharing. In English, we began the week with opportunities to speak and share in class with the topic of ‘my best day.’

Across the week, children planned their ideas in detail before completing an independent diary about their best days ever!

In our afternoons we have been finishing off our science leaflets all about exercise and its many benefits.

Friday 1st December

During our exploration of the Great Fire of London topic, we learnt that most of our knowledge about the event came from primary evidence sources, such as the diaries written by Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. We have used this knowledge in English this week and have been learning about the features of diary writing. We have looked at the diary of Little Red Riding Hood and have had a go at planning and writing a diary entry for one of the characters of the story.

We have continued with multiplication this week in mathematics and have learnt that multiplication is commutative – ask your child what that means!

In art this term we have been looking at how other artists created artwork using owls as their inspiration. We have practiced sketching owls and discovered what realistic and abstract means. The children are now designing their own owl sculptures, using playdough to test their designs and adapt as necessary and then they will be ready to create their own clay models.

Friday 17th November

This week we had a workshop with Ian from Kic theatre about keeping healthy and thinking about food that is good and bad for us. We learnt that we should not put unfamiliar things in our mouths and say, “No thank you, I won’t, I will go an ask a grown up”. We had great fun taking part in all the activities, even our teachers joined in, which really made us laugh.  We thought of some fantastic answers to the questions we were asked by Ian and he was extremely impressed with how well all the classes listened and joined in.

Friday 10th November

In Year 2 this week we have begun looking at subtraction. The children have really impressed us with their application of earlier learning of place value and are showing real confidence in their work.

In our English, the children are using their creative ideas and growing vocabulary to write a shared story of ‘The Mouse who is Afraid of the Outside.’ We are attempting to expand our sentences with the conjunction because.

In the afternoons, we have continued to Study the Great Fire of London and have been creating diary entries as if we were there during the event. The children really enjoyed imagining and acting out the events and have remembered an remarkable number of details.

Friday 3rd November 

In English this week, we have started reading The Owl Who was Afraid of the Dark. The children made paper owls and then moved on to thinking of adjectives to describe Plop's appearance and emotions. 

In maths, we have been partitioning numbers in different ways and learning number bonds to 100 by using our knowledge of number bonds to ten. 

This week in science we have been learning about good hand hygiene and why it is important to wash our hands.  The children have carried out an experiment where everyone touched bread with unwashed hands and then with washed hands. There was lots of discussion about how we could carry out a fair test. The bread was then sealed in a bag, and we are going to watch how much mould grows on them. Everyone is looking forwards to seeing the results!

Friday 20th October

In English this week, we have consolidated our previous two weeks learning on non-chronological reports and the children have been creating their own fact files on their chosen animal. They have had to consider how to group the facts and how to write them in a way that is interesting to the reader, with a particular focus on commas in lists and adjectives. The children have produced some amazing fact files!

We have been continuing to work on addition in maths and have been learning how to exchange when we have too many ones to add to the column. At the end of the week, we consolidated our addition learning with mixed calculations.

We have been continuing our Great Fire of London topic in History and have been amazed and delighted by the extent and calibre of all the home learning projects that have been coming in – thank you to all of you for supporting your children with this, they have all loved sharing their projects with their classes.

Friday 13th October

In maths this week we have been consolidating our addition knowledge. We have been able to take this knowledge and use it to begin to solve some addition word problems.

This week in English we have continued our block of work on non-chronological reports and have created a fact file about moles. We have focused on using interesting adjectives and making our sentences more interesting for our reader. Ask your child what they know about moles!

Our history lesson this week was looking at sources of evidence and understanding how these sources help us to know what happened hundreds of years ago. We examined maps, paintings, newspaper articles and Samuel Pepys’ diary to see what they can tell us about the Great Fire of London.

In DT we are finishing building our fire engines and evaluating them to see what worked well and what we would improve on next time. These will be coming home before half term so that the children can enjoy playing with them.

Friday 6th October

It has been another packed week in Year 2.

In English, we’ve been learning lots of facts about owls. Ask them what they know!

Maths has been all about adding, working gradually towards adding larger 2 digit numbers.

We enjoyed drawing around each other and labelling parts of the body for Science.

And finally in topic, we have been doing some collage artwork all about The Fire of London. Great fun!

Friday 29th September

This week in maths we have moved onto number bonds. We began by using double sided counters to systematically build all the different ways we can make a total of 10. We then moved onto recording this both on whiteboards and into our maths books. The children then learnt that they could use their number bond understanding to find number bonds for different numbers, right up to 20.

It was ‘invent’ week in English this week. The children have been using the planning and writing skills they have learnt over the last two weeks and have created their own exciting stories. They have had to design characters and settings and add them to their plan. They then carefully wrote the beginning, middle and end of their stories before spending some time checking and editing their final pieces.

We have also been discovering more facts about the Great Fire of London and have been discussing how we know about an event that happened over 300 years ago – ask your child what they know about a man called Samuel Pepys!

We have continued looking at life cycles in science, with a particular focus on metamorphosis. This week the children have been using their creative art skills to demonstrate the 4 stages of a ladybird’s life cycle.

Friday 22nd September

This week in Year 2 the children have been enjoying creating their own class adaptations to the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Ask your child to share their story and retell it to you. In maths, we have begun ordering 2-digit numbers and placing them on number lines. In DT, we have been designing and starting to put together our fire engines. We have thoroughly enjoyed sharing our classrooms with you in our ‘Come and See’ events.

Friday 28th April

This term our Topic is focussing on Growing and Plants. We have re-visited life cycles and discovered that plants have a similar life cycle to animals and humans. The children then created their own life cycles of a bean plant. We have also begun an experiment to see which elements plants need to grow and survive. Using our prior knowledge, we have established that plants need light, water, soil and the correct temperature to grow well. The experiment will show us which are the most important and also what happens to a plant that doesn’t have the correct conditions. We will post the results later in the term! All the children have also had the opportunity to plant their own bean to look after and grow in the classroom and they will be keeping a diary of their growth.

Friday 21st April

This week in maths we have continued to learn about money and how to find change. We played shops and answered word problems involving money.

In Design and Technology this week we have begun a new project – to make a hand puppet.

First, we looked at lots of different types of puppets, such as finger puppets, stick puppets and marionettes. The children then had to think about the design criteria for creating a hand puppet, such as using a flexible material so you can move the hand puppet’s arms and head around and ensuring there is a hole for the hand to go into the puppet.

Next, they got busy designing their own hand puppets, including adding colours and the features that they wanted. Over the next few weeks, the classes will be using their detailed templates to sew and decorate their own hand puppets.

Friday 31st March

This week in English, we had to create our very own character. We had to come up with different instructions on how to look after our pet. On Thursday, we had a go at our own creative piece of writing. To be excellent writers we had to make sure we included capital letters, full stops and finger spaces. To make our writing even better we had a go at including some fantastic adjectives and paragraphs.

This week, it was the turn of 2A and 2J to visit the Windmill Community Gardens. As you can see from the photos, the children had a brilliant time (despite the damp weather!). First, they split into groups and had to explore the gardens for all the different fruit trees and plants that are grown there. They were then shown, by a professional chef, how to prepare their fruit for the smoothies in a safe way by making a claw with their hand. Once the fruit was cut, it was blended into a smoothie using the Super Smoothie Making Bike! The smoothie tasted great and lots of the children even came back for seconds.

Friday 24th March

Year 2 have had extra fun in our Design and Technology lesson this week. After designing a class smoothie we then got to visit Windmill Community Gardens. We each had a turn of chopping, peeling and then put the fruit into a blender run by a bike! We found that funny that very funny, especially when Mrs Frith and Mr Sharpe had a go! We finished our lesson evaluating what we liked and disliked about the smoothie we had made. We mostly agreed that next time we would suggest more peddling resulting in less lumps!

In maths this week we have been continuing to learn about time. We have recapped how to tell o’clock, quarter past, half past and quarter to and played different time games, such as time bingo, to check our knowledge.

We then moved onto telling the time in 5 minute intervals and we discovered that there are 60 minutes in an hour and that we can count the minutes in 5’s as we move around the clock. We have also had fun learning how long a second, a minute and an hour are and thinking about what we can achieve in that length of time. We estimated how many star jumps we thought we could do in 1 minute and then timed ourselves to see if our estimations were accurate.

In English, we have begun a new unit of work on instructions. Inspired by the funny story of ‘How to take care of your dinosaur,’ we have been entertained by imagining that we are bringing home a new pet. We have created picture plans of each step to take care of our creature and used them to begin writing our own list of steps to take care of this cheeky pet. Our writing has been focused on the use of conjunctions to stretch our sentences.

17th March 2023

This week Year 2 have been incredibly busy showing their teachers all they have learned with maths, reading and grammar tests. However, we have also squeezed in lessons on the continents and oceans, learning the points of  a compass and discussing plastic pollution. On Friday, we took the time to enjoy some Red Nose Day activities; looking at ways we can improve the world. The children had the challenge to build something that would make people happy out of Lego. Here we are with some of our creations.

10th March 2023

In maths this week we have been looking at time in more depth. The children all made an analogue clock and added numbers. They then had to decide where to put quarter past and quarter to. They have used their clocks to help them in their work all week.

In ICT this week, we had to carry out our own research on minibeasts. We used the chrome books and worked with a partner to log in. We had to choose to research two minibeasts, draw them and find some interesting facts about them.

In topic we are looking at animals and their habitats. We were very lucky to have a visit from 3 chickens. We got to feed, hold and stroke the chickens. It was great fun!

3rd March 2023

2HR began world book day with an early treat sharing a super story by the author Swapna Haddow. We found out she lives in New Zealand and got her idea for the book ‘My dad is a grizzly bear’ from her family. She even taught us how to draw the bear from the front cover. We all agreed that the story was great and are now excited to create our own.

In Science this week we have been thinking about animal habitats. We focused on micro-habitats and discussed different places we might find micro-habitats, such as under the leaves or in a log. We learnt about the different minibeasts that we could find in these habitats and the conditions that made each one right for those insects. We then went outside to the forest area to look at these different habitats and see what minibeasts we could find. We found slugs, a snail, a spider and some worms and were able to examine them closely using the observation boxes. Everyone found it fascinating to be able to look at the insects using the magnifying equipment. The minibeasts were carefully returned to their natural habitat afterwards!

In DT, we have been looking at a variety of smoothies. We all tried the different smoothies and tried to guess the ingredients. We looked at the packaging and the design and discussed what makes the perfect smoothie. After, we evaluated the smoothies and wrote about our favourite.

Friday 24th February

In English this week, we have been learning a new story called Little Answer. Little Answer is the answer to something, but he doesn’t know what. Children had fun creating their very own little answers with their own answers to go with the character. We also learnt actions to the story.

In maths, we have been learning about the properties of 2d and 3d shapes. We have been using mathematical language to describe them. We made a 2d shape picture and we sorted 3d shapes according to their properties.

In PSHE this week we looked at the word ‘together’ and discussed what we thought of when we saw and heard that word. We recorded all of our ideas so that we can re-visit the word at the end of the term.

We also began to talk about working together and how to give each other helpful feedback and praise. We played a game in our PE lesson which involved everyone having to work together to follow instructions, while also giving each other feedback and praise. Everyone was very kind and respectful of each other and lots of lovely, supportive conversations were happening throughout the lesson.

Thursday 9th February 2023

In topic this week we have been sharing our learning from our ‘What an Achievement!’ unit in the form of a letter to Mr Sharpe. We have been telling him all the interesting facts we have learned about 3 amazing nurses; Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole and Edith Cavell.

3rd February 2023

In maths this week we created our very own fraction pizza. We got to choose what sauce we would like for the base. We also, choose our toppings and had to work out the fraction for each topping.

In history this week we have been learning about Mary Seacole and we created stamps to commemorate her achievements.

In PSHE this week we have been learning about people who help us.

27th January 2023

In maths this week, we have moved on from halves to quarters. We began the week by looking at a quarter of a shape and have now progressed to using this knowledge to be able to find a quarter of a number.

In English this week we have been learning and retelling the story, Little Red Riding Hood. The children have been producing some wonderful writing. Well done!

This week we made a timeline of Edith Cavell’s life and wrote facts about those significant moments in her life. We then made a Venn diagram about all three nurses Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole and Edith Cavell comparing their similarities and differences.