Year 2 2013-14
This page is an archived class page from the past.
Visit this years' class pages for the latest information
Year 2 Class 2013- 2014
The Curriculum
This is our long term plan for the year.
The slides from our curriculum evening tell you all about the curriculum in Year 2.
Summer Term 2
Pentecost
We celebrated Pentecost with a whole school party day. The children learned about Pentecost, and took part in activities in every class across school. Our Class assembly was also about Pentecost, the children told the story through drama, dance and poetry, they were fabulous!
Topic Week - Sports
This half term has started with Sports week. Year 2 were given Group A for the World Cup so we set off learning about the countries and teams. The children did lots of research on the fizz books and produced country fact files for Brazil, Mexico, Cameroon and Croatia as well as mini books about the teams and players. We followed instructions to draw the teams home and away kits, designed mascots and painted the flags ready for our sports day on Thursday.
We learned a little about justice around the world and prayed for all the people in Brazil who are living in poverty. We practised the CAFOD world cup song and tried to learn the rythmn using plastic cups as musical intruments. At the topic showcase some parents and Mrs Knight had a go!
Our sports day started a parade with our flags and a dance to the world cup song, we even did a few complicated Samba moves! The children then took part in running and relay races followed by a carousel of activities including ball skills and skipping. Many thanks to Mrs Harvey for organising.
Summer Term 1
The summer term has started with animals and nature week. The children had the opportunity to get close to lots of different animals, insects and birds with visits from Sam's Safari and SMJ Falconry. In our classroom we had a giant millipede with 280 legs, a stick insect from Dorset, a stick insect from Australia called Prickles and a king snake from Arizona. Some decided they wanted to explore our classroom including George the yellow foot tortoise, Holiday the great haired armadillo and a gecko lizard from New Caledonia. The children could handle all the creatures, they were very brave!
Literacy
This half term we have been reading extended stories by Roald Dahl, we enjoyed reading the BFG and The Twits. We magpied exciting words and listened carfeully to the extraordinary words used by Roald Dahl. After drawing the characters the children wrote amazing character descriptions. If the BFG could blow us any happy dream we thought about places we would like to go and wrote dream poems. Here is a picture of the children acting out one of their new tricks to play on Mr Twit.
Maths
We have been practising all four number operations and place value as well as having a really big focus on times tables. I am sure some of the children have been coming home singing our 3 times table song!
RE
We have been learning all about Eastertide, the children created beautiful pictures for He is Risen and we have been re-telling the Easter story. During the spring and summer term we have produced a collective worship book to capture the children's wonderful thoughts during our daily collective worship.
We finished Summer Term 1 with Science week. Year 2 had lots of fun doing experiments. As we had been reading the Twits we invented some new tricks to play on Mr and Mrs Twit. These included fizzy lemonade flying in the air and landing on Mr Twit and Mrs Twit thinking everything was turning blue because we managed to turn white flowers blue and green. The monkeys also wrote messages in invisible ink but Mr and Mrs Twit could read them after they had been left in the sun.
Spring Term 2
Spring term 2 started with robot week. The robots the children made in the half term holidays were amazing and they did some very helpful jobs. Miss Hulbert liked the robot which marked all the books. We described our robots thinking about what they looked like, their character and what they could do. The children really wanted to make animations or movies with their robots. Even though this was an ambitious project the children made and painted scenery, wrote a short robot story and made animations using movie maker. After lots of hard work and a little help from Year 6 we played them on the white board for the children to see, they were very funny!
World Book Day 6th March 2014
Lots of book characters arrived in the classroom for World Book Day. Miss Truchbull was was very very strict and called Matilda some very unpleasant names, she even gave out detention. Cruella de Vil found some dalmatian puppies around school and tried to catch them for their fur and the BFG brought in a snozzcumber and all the children fell asleep.
We pretended to be news reporters for St Joseph's Newsround, interviewed each other and wrote a news report all about World Book Day. Our survey found that 90% of children in Year 2 enjoyed reading at home and 60% preferred reading to watching television. These results compared very favourably to the National Literacy Trust which found that only 46% of children preferred reading to watching television and only 22% would choose to read a book at home. We also entered the World Book Day bookmark competition.
IPC Media Magic
As part of our Media Magic Topic we visited the Media Museum in Bradford. The children explored the television room, presented the news and stood in the television studios. They had great fun pretending to be a weather forecaster, standing outside 10 Downing Street and even sky diving out of a plane! They learned all about the history of television, photography, gaming and animation and saw lots of tricks and illusions on the magic floor.
Literacy
In Literacy we learned all about fables and their meanings. We re-told fables using freeze frame drama. The children wrote their own interesting fables using exciting vocabulary, sentence openers, speech and connectives to explain behaviour. The fables had penguins, polar bears, snakes and lots more getting up to all sorts of things.
Maths
This half term we learned to tell the time, estimated and recorded weight and capacity and measured length with lots of practical resources. We did lots of work with number adding and subtracting different numbers, solving missing number sentences and word problems.
RE
We all enjoyed St Joseph's Day. We celebrated the day with a school Mass and lots of fun activities. During this half term our unit was the Mass and we also made our Lenten promises and learned about Lent. We thought about the children all over the world who do not have as much food as we do. We decided, as part of the CAFOD Dig Deep campaign, we would like to grow vegetables. Here are our cucumbers and peppers sprouting! We are also planning to grow vegetables in our school garden next term.
Spring Term 1
We started this half term with our space topic week. Nasa wrote a letter to us each day, setting the children lots of missions to complete during the week. If the children achieved these missions they would complete their astronaut training. The missions included writing a space book, making and painting planets, painting star constellations and lots of space maths. We played consequences and created some very interesting aliens which the children described using sentences with 3 nouns and adjectives, commas and connectives, a lot to remember! At the end of the week the qualified astronauts entered the planetarium to look at Space. A fabulous time was had by all.
IPC Media Magic
Sign2 Sing
Year 2 and Year 1 took part in the sign 2 sing event raising money for Sign Health. As part of our Media Magic topic we have been thinking about people who may find it more difficult to communicate than ourselves. Everyone wore a scarf like the charity mascot and signed and sung two wonderful songs. The children learned signing very quickly, look at the concentration on their faces!
Multi Skills Event at PHGS
Year 2 took part in the multi skills event at PHGS with lots of other schools from the area. They had a fabulous time trying out lots of skills including throwing, catching, balancing, jumping and running and working together as a team. Well done year 2!
Literacy
In Literacy we read stories by the author Anthony Browne. The children wrote an alternative Gorilla story and practised asking and answering questions using connectives because and although. We used varied sentence structure to imagine and describe what the children could see through the magic mirror. We also wrote setting descriptions of their walk to Grandma's house through the forest.
Maths
We did lots and lots of maths! We practised multiplication and division and learned our 2, 5 and 10 times table, it takes lots of practise! Some children started to learn 3 and 4 times tables too. We understood that subtraction is the inverse of addition and found the difference between numbers. In the last week we recognised and described the features of 2D and 3D shapes and some of us learned about right angles and different types of triangles.
Autumn Term 2
This half term started with Otley topic week. The children went on a walk around Otley looking at the amazing buildings and architecture. We also visited the art galleries to inspire our art work and the market to look for ideas for our crafts.
Literacy
We have been reading and writing traditional stories. The children read different versions of Jack and the Beanstalk and wrote their own interesting version. Children learned to use traditional story language, openers, endings and repeated phrases. The children turned into the characters and acted out the scenes, this lead to excellent writing using speech marks.
At the end of the half term we created Christmas acrostic poems and wrote Christmas sentences using connectives.
Maths
We did lots of work with money to help us at our market, recognising coins, adding coins and giving change. Lots of things in our class were measured including the Christmas tree and the beanstalk, learning to estimate and measure to the nearest cm. Of course we did lots of number work too!
IPC - Let's Celebrate
The focus this half term has been celebrations of light. We learned all about Diwali, re-telling the story of Rama and Sita in our assembly, making diva lamps and painting symmetrical rangoli patterns. We thought about why we celebrate advent and wrote thoughtful advent promises.
Autumn Term 1
Literacy
We have been learning about stories with familiar settings As well as thinking about our own experiences we talked about what if the unfamiliar happens! We enjoyed reading Mr Pusskins by Sam Lloyd. We shared pictures of our pets and brought in our special toys. Miss Hulbert loved them all except the scary pet spider! We described how we would feel if our pets got lost using adjectives and our Lost Posters helped to find them. We wrote stories about our pets and toys running away, they had amazing adventures, some even ended up in Paris and China! I am pleased to say they all got home safely. We have also been reading Whizz Pop Granny. We put spells on each other using adverbs and adjectives and created a helpful spell book.
Maths
We have been doing lots of work with number using practical resources to count, order, add and subtract, as well as playing lots of fun maths games.
We decided to go on a Maths adventure in the jungle. We added two digit numbers along the path to the golden gate, jumped across the stepping stones watching out for greedy Charlie Crocodile and added the bananas in the trees using partitioning to swing across with the monkeys. At the end we found golden coins.
Mathletics
Please encourage your child to use this fun website to support their learning. Children earn points and certificates and we celebrate our Mathlete of the week in our Monday assembly.
Lots of children are really keen to learn times tables. Here are some other useful websites:
IPC - Let's Celebrate
We started our topic with a party. We enjoyed playing traditional party games, dancing at a disco with Year 1 and eating party food. We thought about how we celebrate birthdays today and compared this to the 1940's. We sang lots of different birthday songs and Happy Birthday in French, Spanish, German and Polish.
At Harvest time we created our own Harvest production in class and we thought about children all over the world who do not have enough food to eat. We wrote thoughtful Harvest prayers.
After ordering the events in a wedding we held our own wedding in class. Everyone took part in our pretend celebration, vows were read, rings were exchanged and we celebrated the marriage of the happy couple. We also researched weddings in other countries and religions and found out about Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Afghan, Scottish and Irish wedding traditions WOW!
RE
This half term we have been learning about God's chosen people, Abraham, Moses and Daniel. We thought about our own and others special gifts and how we are chosen to follow in God's way.
