This afternoon we have had a fantastic time celebrating the Coronation of King Charles III. We had a special picnic as a school in the lunch hall. We also had the opportunity to go to different classrooms around the school, to play games. At the end of the day we had a little party back in our classrooms whilst we enjoyed some lovely snacks brought from home!
Have a fantastic Coronation weekend everybody! From Miss Young, Mrs Latham and Miss Lowry.
This week’s Living and Learning statement is ‘I know the importance of a healthy diet’.
This week we discussed what a healthy diet might look like and what sort of things we should try to eat. We talked about how we need to have a good balance of different food groups to keep our bodies healthy.
We also discussed how we should aim to eat more of one food group and less of another. For example we should eat more foods like fruit and vegetables, and less of sugary foods like sweets and cakes.
Why not watch this clip at home and see how you can have an even more healthy, balanced diet at home? Keeping my body healthy – BBC Teach
This half term we are looking at plants and what they need to survive.
We have planted seeds, bulbs and peas and put some of them into different conditions. We started off by planting bulbs (see below).
We kept watering two of our bulbs and they started to grow! See our 3 week progress picture below. We noticed that these bulbs started to grow roots, and several green shoots started to grow from the top.
The bulbs that were not watered did not grow at all and have started to turn brown.
We also planted 6 different types of seeds. Our sunflowers have been the most successful so far. We decided to move them to their own pots to grow the best that they can.
Once the plants grow a little bigger, we are hoping to plant them outside, around our KS1 playground.
It has been brilliant to see how engaged the children have been with the Science topic this half term. We can’t wait to see how our plants grow and what will happen next.
Help at home by encouraging children to plant some seeds, bulbs or peas of their own!
Last week in Living and Learning, Ks1 discussed how we can stay safe in the sun. 2C had a brilliant group discussion where many of the children came up with ways that they could stay safe in the sun including –
We then went onto the playground where we spent some time in the sun. The children identified the best shaded areas on our playground. We also acted out how we would get ready for school and what we would need to bring if it was a hot day.
Help at home by encouraging children to apply sun cream regularly, drink lots of liquids and come appropriately dressed for school.
This week’s Living and Learning statement is ‘I recognise the importance of sleep’.
In our session, we talked about what sorts of things we can do in order to help us get to sleep on an evening. We also talked about how we might be able to get back to sleep, if we wake up in the night.
The children listened to a story of a girl who found it difficult to sleep on a night. They identified several reasons the girl was not able to sleep and linked this to their own lives. Many of the children said that they had realised some of the reasons they might wake up or have bad dreams are caused by the things they do before going to bed. We came up with a few ideas of how we could relax before bedtime and adjust our routines to get the perfect night’s sleep.
We made some posters to remind us of what to avoid before bedtime and what we can do to help us fall asleep. Here are some of the posters the children came up with.
John McAdams has been our scientist of focus this half term in KS1. McAdams made the first macadamised road. The road he invented was smooth, durable and had good drainage. We did our own experiments to investigate which road surface was best for cars.
For the first experiment, we pushed a toy car down a ramp to measure how far it would travel. We did a comparative test where we kept everything the same but changed one thing. We kept the car the same, the ramp, the ramp height and the person pushing the car. We tested the car on 3 surfaces; concrete, laminate and carpet. We found that the concrete was the best surface because it was smooth and the car travelled the furthest. The carpet was the worst surface because it was rough and soft. The car did not travel very far on the carpet.
We also tested different road surfaces for drainage. The road surfaces were large stones, small pebbles, sand and flour. We tested 4 road surfaces without water to see how easily the car could travel across. We then poured water onto each surface to see which road had the best drainage. In both tests, the road surface made of small pebbles was the best because the it was the least bumpy and has the best drainage due to the small gaps between the pebbles.
One child wrote ‘The worst road surface was flour because it was bumpy. When we poured water on it was sticky and the car didn’t move.’
We have really enjoyed our Science topic this half term
Our focus in Y2 Maths this week has been shapes. We have been looking 2D and 3D shapes. We know the names of lots of 2D shapes, how to count sides and how to count the vertices. We have also explored 3D shapes, how to count edges, faces and vertices. We even came up with a method, so that we wouldn’t loose track of the faces we had already counted!
Today in 2C we looked at vertical symmetry and how to spot it in 2D shapes. We used paper shapes and folded them to see if they had vertical lines of symmetry. We also used mirrors to check the symmetry of shapes in our books and plastic 2D shapes.
Over this half term, KS1 have been learning to use the program Scratch Jr. We have been learning to create and debug algorithms, create sequences using commands and use this to put together a quiz.
We know how to choose Sprites (characters) and backgrounds.
We know how to get our Sprites to speak and how to change what they say.
We also know how to get our Sprites to move and how to sequence our commands correctly.
This week we finished our quizzes. Have have had so much fun using Scratch Jr and learning how it works!
Help at home by downloading Scratch Jr or another coding app or program – ScratchJr – Home
This week in Year 2 we are learning about verbs. Our school defines a verb as ‘a doing or a being word’. Today, Year 2 went out onto the playground for a lesson about verbs. We imagined that we were getting up on a morning and getting ready for school. This involved acting out lots and lots of verbs. We slept, we yawned, we stretched and then we brushed our teeth!
The children loved doing their learning on the playground and said that it would help them to remember what type of word class a verb is.
When we returned to the classroom, we recapped some of the verbs we had learnt. We also wrote some of the verbs in the past and present tense.
Help at home by discussing verbs as you do tasks at home.
In Year 2 Maths we are currently learning about money. We are able to recognise coins and notes, and differentiate between pounds and pence, but we are still working on this! We have also been learning to make amounts of money by choosing the correct pounds, pence and notes.
We have used our knowledge of addition and multiplication to perform calculations about money. Next week we will use our knowledge of partitioning, grouping and subtraction to help us with our next block of learning.
Help at home – by showing your child coins and notes and discussing their value. You can also use the money and practice addition.