Year 2 2014–15

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Visit this years' class pages for the latest information

Welcome to Year Two 2014/15

In Year 2 you will find

- 30 wonderful children.

- Miss Hulbert is our Class Teacher.

- Mrs Russell and Mrs Mulholland are our Teaching Assistants.

- Alfie is our class puppet  who goes on an adventure every weekend with our star of the week. He has been to parties, swimming and on holiday.

In our classroom we are very lucky to have lots of space, computers, a wonderful book corner, a role play area and lots of resources and working walls to help us learn.

The Curriculum

This is our long term plan for the year.

LTP 2014-15

Summer 2

Here is our class newsletter for Summer Term 2.

Summer 2 201415 NEWSLETTER

Topic Week The Seaside

The seaside came to Otley and we went to the seaside at Filey. During the week the children  learned about everything under the sea, sang songs, created art work, made a seaside in a box and wrote  about their adventures under the ocean using a character from Commotion in the Ocean.

Tennis Coaching

It really felt like summer when the children took part in tennis coaching, playing some fantastic shots over the net! Well done Year 2.

Year 2 Assembly Fathers Day

The children wrote beautiful poems about  their dads and we learned about the history of Father's Day. We thought about and thanked  both our earthly fathers and our Heavenly Father. Lastly the children showed some of the things they are proud of achieving with the help of school and their families.

Alice in Wonderland Pantomine

Sports Day

Well done for a fantastic sports day enjoyed by all.  The sun shone and the children took part enthusiastically and cheered each other on, great team work.

Science

This half term we have been learning about our bodies and keeping them healthy. We tried to decide where all our organs are and got some interesting answers! It was fun learning about the jobs which different parts of our bodies do and challenging learning lots of  difficult vocabulary about the heart and the brain. We measured our heart beats before and after exercise and  got some rather unusual results for healthy children!  

English

This half term we have been continuing our study of Roald Dahl.  The term started with  a freeze frame drama about a new trick Mr Twit had decided to play on Mrs Twit. Next the children  read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They created a new chocolate invention, wrote a new chapter for the book, created a poster to advertise their chocolate and wrote a verse for the Oompa-Loompa song.

The long awaited launch of our new book scheme took place with a bug day. Here are all the children dressed as bugs. It is fantastic to see the children even more excited about reading the new books and completing the online activities.

Maths

Summer 1

Here is our class newsletter for Summer Term 1

Summer 1 201415 NEWSLETTER

Topic Week Go Green

How could we make our school greener? We read Michael Saves the World and learned about reduce, resuse, recycle and repair. We walked around school looking for opportunities to make St Joseph's greener. We decided to make posters to display around school and became Food Waste Champions to monitor how much food we throw away.   Next tt was discovery time,  where  does our food come from? and how many miles   has it travelled? Did you know that some of our plates of food had travelled over 15,000 miles!  Finally we learned about what happens to waste with our visitors from MAGNA and wrote pledges to reduce our carbon footprint. We loved singing our song "Were Going Green" too.

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St George's Day

Year 2 Saint is St George and here are some pictures of our celebration day.

Pentecost

We celebrated Pentecost with  a party day involving, dressing in Pentecost colours, writing a poem, using music and actions to re-tell the story, creating lots of colourful art.

The General Election

We took part in our very own election at St Josephs, taking our polling cards along to the polling station and voting for which Year 5 party we would like to run the school.

Geography

Our topic this term is Our Wonderful World. We  were very excited to use our new i pads to find  locations on maps and places in the United Kingdom. We learned about aerial photography using Google Earth  to find our school and our houses.

Science

In Science we went on a mini beast hunt and nature walk. The mini beasts went into our choice chamber and we predicted which habitat they would prefer.

English

We learned about nocturnal animals, researched facts on the I-pads and then wrote non-chronological reports about nocturnal animals and night time. The children particularly  enjoyed reading The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark and writing about how wonderful the night is.

This term we are reading books by Roald Dahl. Our first book is the BFG, we wrote the most interesting and extraordinary character descriptions of the BFG and then made a dream catcher to catch our dreams.

Maths

We started off the term with more practical maths partitioning and adding numbers.

Spring Term 2

Here is our class newsletter including dates for your diary.

Spring 2 201415 NEWSLETTER  new format

Easter Craft Day

We had lots of fun in KS1 and YR making Easter Crafts. Happy Easter everyone.

St Joseph's Day

We enjoyed St Joseph's Day Mass and then had lots of fun to celebrate.

History and Geography

History continued to be taught through our topic The Time Machine. After learning all about the Great Fire of London and the Plague last half term we travelled back to when the children's grandparents were young, learning all about domestic life, toys, books and school. Lots of fun and hard work was involved in each child making a powerpoint presentation and learning in our toy museum.

Time capsules were made for homework about a time in history of interest and we were allowed to open them in April 2015. When sharing the homework we learned about the Romans. Vikings, Egyptians, WW2  and lots more. We finished our topic by making a time capsule all about 2015 which has been hidden away and is not to be opened until 2025 ( although the children can have  a peep before they leave in Year 6!)

Assembly

Our assembly was all about Mothers Day, told through history and poetry. The children demonstrated their fabulous skipping skills too.

The Eclipse

A day to remember, even though it was cloudy!

English

This half term began with lots of traditional poetry and singing. The children wrote amazing poems for Mother's Day too. We then studied the author Beatrix Potter linked to our topic, writing setting descriptions of Mr McGregor's Garden and stories about Peter Rabbit and other animal adventures. We have been working hard to edit and improve our stories by looking at fables. All the children made Miss Hulbert's very boring story so much more exciting to read by using noun phrases, sentence openers which interest the reader and even similes and adverbial phrases. Here is Mr McGregor's garden that we made.

Science

We have been learning about animal life cycles and structures, including lots of difficult scientific vocabulary such as proboscis, thorax, albumen and chalaza. We created the life cycle of a frog, chicken and butterfly. The new chickens in reception were very  cute and our caterpillars finally turned into butterflies

Skipping Festival 

It was an exciting day! World Book Day and the skipping festival at Ralph Thoresby High School. The children had been practising and trying their best, even when it was difficult they did not give up, they kept going and believed in themselves. Some of the children said "it was the best day ever!" We won sixteen gold, twelve silver and two bronze awards. As all the results were added up there was a big drum roll and Year 2 St Joseph's achieved gold! (and 80 points ahead of the second school). As well as  being very excited about being the champions, the children have learned that if you keep trying and you don't give up you can achieve so much. They have even learned that skipping at home is more fun than playing on the computer!

Topic Week Monsters

Our half term started with Monster week. The children wanted to have a Moshi Monster day, so they created their own monster and wrote a character description. We watched the start of Monsters University and then they wrote stories about their monster's first day at University.

Spring 1

Here is our class newsletter including dates for your diary.

SPRING 1 201415 NEWSLETTER  new format

History and Geography

Children are learning History and Geography through our topic The Time Machine. First of all we travelled back to the age of the dinosaurs in our time machine. We had a dinosaur day to launch our new topic. The children became paleontologists  digging  out fossils and finding a baby dinosaur fossil in an egg! They enjoyed painting dinosaurs using patterns and drawing dinosaurs, learning dinosaur voacbulary and writing exciting non-fiction books.  A  special visitor came with lots of fossils and it was fun doing fossil rubbings and printing. He was very impressed with the children's knowledge.

We were paleontologists.

Topic Week - Performance

Year 2 had lots of fun in our whole school topic week. We enjoyed a fabulous Cinderella pantomine and then wrote play scripts. Next we created traditional puppet theatres and puppets  so we could re-tell Cinderella, practising our drama and IT skills.

English

We have been reading stories by Anthony Browne to understand how  detailed pictures can tell  stories, particularly emotions and feelings. This sparked our imaginations and our Gorilla adventures were very entertaining. After reading Silly Billy we learned all about the story from Guatemala and made worry dolls.

Maths

Times tables! Times tables! Timestables! We had fun with one of the children's rock and roll CD's and have been using lots of practical activities to help. Some children practised number bonds using skittles and learned division with sweets and some have been doing tricky maths learning column addition and subtraction. On our measuring day we jumped to measure length, poured water to understand capacity and played who wants to be a millionaire to understand weight. We nearly became millionaires!

Science

Our plants are growing! We planted beans, carrots and cress. We are recording what happens in our seed diaries and testing what a plant needs to grow.  We found that some  bean plants had not grown because we took away things like light or water. We have learned lots of vocabulary about the structure and lifecycle of a plant. Finally we studied seeds under a magnifying glass and had a messy lesson cutting up fruit and painting seeds.

PE

Skipping has been so much fun and the children have improved so much ready for our skipping competition.  They can double bounce, speed bounce and much more! We are hoping all children will be able to attend  the skipping competition on 5th March. The children took part in the Year 2 multi-skills festival at PHGS and were amazing, showing great skills, fantastic team work, everyone trying their best and excellent behaviour.

Autumn Term 2

Here is our class newsletter including dates for your diary.

AUTUMN 2 201415 NEWSLETTER new format

Trip to The Wood Beneath The World

Year 2 enjoyed a fabulous trip to The Wood Beneath the World at Leeds Town Hall. The children were taken on an interactive  story telling walk through the woods with Jack. They solved clues and riddles, sang songs and explored keeping a look out for owls, lions and gabble rachets. This inspired the childrens' creative writing and they wrote amazing setting descriptions and stories about their adventure in the woods.

Anti-Bullying Week

First we thought about how to be a good friend and how we are all different.  As we have been learning about how to keep safe on line we also talked about being a good friend on line. We each wrote two lines of a poem and we put it together into a class song and rap. When the children are older and talk to their friends on the phone, text or online, they will hopefully remember this song.

Topic Week Mystery and Intrigue

Autumn term 2  started with our topic week Mystery and Intrigue. When the children arrived at school a tardis had landed in the school grounds!  The children soon realised that it was no longer 2014 and we looked at clues to work out which year we had travelled back to.

English

This term we have been learning about traditional stories. We have been writing character descriptions, speech using speech marks, setting descriptions and  retelling Jack and the Beanstalk.  It was fun to read the children's very interesting and unusual stories! After enjoying our school pantomime, Dick Whittington and His Cat, the children retold the story by hugging the text.

Maths

The  children have learned so much in maths this half term including data handling using tally charts and bar charts, subtraction as the inverse of addition, word problems, vocabulary about money, adding amounts of money in our witches shop, doubling, measuring length and ordinal numbers. We have even started to learn times tables! Our maths continues to use lots of  practical activities.

PE

In the middle of Christmas week we managed to take part in a skipping workshop. We will be practising in the Spring term to get ready for the Year 2 skipping festival.

Well done to all the children for a fabulous Christmas performance " Christmas with the Aliens"

Autumn Term 1

Here is our class newsletter

AUTUMN  1 201415 NEWSLETTER  new format

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At harvest we thought about the  1 in 8 people  around the world who do not have enough food to eat and the children wanted to take part in the CAFOD BIG silly share, so we did something silly to raise money. On our BIG silly day we all came to school in silly clothes, made silly cakes, drinks and biscuits to sell,  wrote silly sentences, sang a  silly song about eating healthy and used our senses; smell, touch and taste to  guess food in the BIG food guessing game. Thank you to all parents and carers who supported us, we raised a fantastic £102 for CAFOD. 

History and Geography

Children will be learning History and Geography  through our topic  The  Magical Mystery Tour. Our topic launched  with an exciting holiday day. The children received a letter from explorers who had discovered a new island off the south coast of England. We set off on St Joseph's aeroplane to explore! After a last and final call for a passenger, an invalid flight ticket and some interesting items in the suitcase which beeped at security, passports were checked and everyone safely boarded the plane. When we landed in New Island the children designed fabulous islands to help attract visitors and wrote exciting descriptions. The afternoon was filled with making sand sculptures, identifying rock pool creatures, singing holiday songs and practising ICT skills with our summer photo booth. Finally we landed safely back in Otley.

English

This half term we have been reading lots of books to inspire creative writing. We read Once Upon an Ordinary School Day by Colin McNaughton. Miss Hulbert turned into Mr Gee and played some music, our imaginations took us to lots of exciting places including spy land, a circus and pirate island. Then we wrote stories about our extraordinary day. We also had lots of fun describing our islands. We have been using our magpie books to share lots of adjectives to use in our writing and we tried to beat the teacher. 

We read The Magic Beach by Alison Lester and wrote amazing list poems. We shared the story  of  The Magic Bed by John Burningham  and wrote about our interesting journeys on a magic bed. To finish this half term we read Whizz Pop Granny and pretended our own grannies were magic and wrote magic spells to help us do lots of funny things!

Science

This half term we are learning about living things and their habitats. The children have used fizz books to research  the needs of living things and explore less familiar habitats. They have also been explorers around the local environment, going on an autumn walk and making their own small creature habitats.

Here are our small creature habitats:

Maths

We have been learning our number bonds and  how to add on a number line with  lots  of practical resources and  we have used the outdoors too.