Welcome to Year 2

Please click on the photographs to see the gallery.

2018–19

Welcome to Year 2

Our class teacher is Miss Hulbert.

Our teaching assistant is Mrs Mulholland.

We have 29 delightful, hard working, well behaved and fun loving children.

We have a class puppet called Alfie too who is very excited about coming home with us. In Year 2 we also have Give Up Gerald the giraffe who always gives up and Work It Out Whizz who always tries his best and learns from his mistakes. We all want to be like Work It Out Whizz!

PARENT INFORMATION

Spelling

Spellings are sent home on Monday and tested the following Monday.

Reading

Please ensure children are reading their books and completing on line activities on Active Learn / Bug Club. Children  should be changing their reading books at least once a week.

Library books are changed on Fridays.

Maths

Children have mathletics and timestable rock star passwords. These are wonderful resources to consolidate learning in the classroom.

Homework

Sometimes maths or grammar homework will be set on  Monday night and this is to be completed for the following Monday.

The homework log is a project for each half term. It is given out the first Friday of each halt term and due back the last Monday before each  holiday. 

Summer Term

Health and Well Being Week

Our Health and Well being week got off to a fun start on Monday when we cooked a delicious and healthy Chilli con carne. We also learnt about the 5 food groups and the proportions of these groups that we should be eating. We worked in small groups to match foods to their correct category.

In PSHE we continued to discuss the ‘leader in me,’ we talked about how cooperation can really help within the classroom. We also watched a short film about a little boy who learnt to control his emotional outbursts and the strategies that helped. Ask your child about the Push-Pull-Dangle. We also wrote our own class mission statement.

On Thursday we had an amazing time at PHGS. We went on: Go-karts, Bungee trampolines, Zorb bumper and amazing inflatables.

Finally, Friday was filled with yet more activity when we took part in lots of cricket themed activities led by Y6. After lunch we took part in our annual Sports Day where we competed as countries from around the world. We’re sure you’ll agree that Year 2 have had a happy and healthy week.

Trip to Scarborough

As we arrived at Scarborough, the rain began to pour, but this didn’t stop the children having lots of fun. Here are pictures of digging in the sand, splashing in the sea and listening to the life guards.

In the Sea

With the Lifeguards

History

Castle Topic Week

Our exciting castle week started off with our visit to Spofforth Castle. Dating back to the 13th century and owned by the Percy family. The children had fun finding lots of features of the castle and drawing sketches too. Later in English we wrote a recount of our trip which included lots of historical information.

On Tuesday we learnt about heraldry and designed our own shields, with our own personal coat of arms. We discovered the meaning of our names, and learnt about the significance of our chosen animal, symbol, object and our hobby. In ICT we used a website called worldspinner.com and had fun choosing a variety of options to design our own IT shields. We also made our own castles by using excel to create pixel art.

We also solved the maths mystery of Spire Castle.

On Wednesday we tried our hands at junk modelling our own castles from cardboard boxes, tubes and tissue paper. This built up an appetite for our medieval banquet served up to us by the teaching staff who acted as our wenches and serfs. We were entertained by some passing minstrels (Mrs Shakespeare & Co) and finished our banquet with a medieval dance.

We enjoyed our ‘Knight’ workshop and found out what life was like as a medieval knight (the path of this journey began as a ‘page’ at age 7!) We learnt that not only were knight’s expected to have detailed knowledge of horsemanship and warfare strategy. They were also immersed in a culture of refinery and elegance. Knights were expected to understand the rules of chivalry and courtly love and many were accomplished in the arts of music and dance!

RE

Collective worship

All the children have now lead collective worship magnificently. Here we are saying Our Father with actions during prayer time.

We reflected on the Holy Spirit we thought about all the wonderful elements that the Holy Spirit was comprised off and wrote sentences to show what we felt the Holy Spirit was like..

We have been learning about the feast of the Ascension we considered how we would feel if we were to lose a very good friend and related this to the time when Jesus left his disciples and returned to heaven. We took turns to play the role of Jesus by ‘hot seating’ and filmed each other using the IPads.

In collective worship we have been thinking about catholic values. Year 2 choose generosity and we thought of so many wonderful ways to show we can be generous.

PHOTO

St George’s Day

St George’s Day Assembly

We retold the story of St George through poetry and drama in our class assembly. We learned lots of facts about our class saint and thought about how we can be like St George.

Our RE topic is now on Eastertide. We have been learning about the resurrection of Jesus. We reflected on the thoughts and feelings of Mary Magdalene and Mary, Jesus’ mother when they discovered his empty tomb and their surprise when an angel appeared.

Science

Nature Photography

We became nature detectives and explored our school grounds to record data on living thinks for the WWF. We took photographs too ready for ICT where we will learn to edit, crop and resize photographs

Plants

In science we have been learning about the four main parts of a plant - leaves, flower, stem and roots. We discussed each function and planted our own seeds to enable us to observe the lifecycle of a plant.  We tehn moved on to learn about the life cycle of a simple flowering plant - germination, growth, flowering and seed production. We carried out an investigation to see what seeds need to germinate. We set up 6 pots, 5 of which had one ingredient missing. We made predictions, and will be recording the results on a weekly basis.

Animal Lifecycles

Here we are holding the chicks from YR as we start to learn about animal lifecycles.

English

Following Castle week and the wonderful castles Year 2 built out of cardboard and Lego, we watched a film about the Lego inventor: Ole Christiansen. We thought about the key events in Ole's life and how to write about them chronologically, we tried to make our biography as exciting as possible by using conjunctions, adjectives and adverbs.

After waiting in anticipation for a reply, we were delighted to find out that Her Majesty had written to us!! She loved our letters and even tried to answer some of our questions!

Our English lessons have been quite exciting. Following our work on the Queen, Miss Hulbert asked us to write our own letters to Her Majesty! We have had lots of discussion about how we can make our country even better and improve life for our future generations. Our wonderful letters are now written and are being sent to the Queen. We promise to let you know when we get a reply.

We took our artwork outside and used the playground to create some interesting chalk word art.

Maths

This week in Maths we’ve been learning about position and direction. We practised our clockwise and anti-clockwise quarter turns by moving around the classroom. We also began to learn how to read coordinates on a grid.

We had lots of fun playing the maths games that we all brought in for our homework.

Music

We finally put on our Cinderella performance we had been learning in music. The children learned songs, drama and percussion instruments. The performance had the audience laughing with super dancing at the ball and one of the ugly sisters accidentally hitting the other ugly sister with a shoe!

PE

Well done to Year 2 for winning so many certificates at the skipping festival. Altogether we won 12 gold, 12 bronze and 6 silver awards. The skill level of the team skipping was described as Year 4 standard. I am so proud of all the children persevering to improve their skipping skills. They have been so enthusiastic about skipping at every opportunity.

We had lots of fun when we got to use the PE apparatus in the hall. Using the climbing frame, low angled ladders, walking planks and gymnastics benches we practised our balancing skills and how to land appropriately.

Spring Term

Topic week Dinosuars

What an incredibly exciting and fun-filled Dinosaur week we’ve had in Year 2! The week began with a visit from Steve the paleontologist and Sophie his T-Rex! He told us all about what life was like for a T-Rex in the late Cretaceous period- 65 million years ago. We even got to use special tools to help us find fossils and dinosaur bones during our workshop.

Dinosaurs are clearly a huge hit in Year 2 and were a source of great inspiration. In English we wrote a recount of our exciting workshop with Sophie the dinosaur (who had left our corridor in a bit of a mess!) We couldn't believe it when we realised that Sophie had even left a dinosaur egg!

We used the Ipads to do some dinosaur research and used these facts to write a non-fiction dinosaur book. After designing and creating our own dinosaurs in art, we wrote descriptions about its appearance, diet and habitat.

 Did you know we now have a new member of Year 2? (We even managed to create our own class dinosaur!)  We think you'll agree, Super Steggy the Stegosaurus will be very happy with us here in Year 2. Finally a big well done to all the children who brought in their brilliant dinosaur art work, it has been really enjoyable hearing about and looking at their amazing creations. 

In and amongst all this Dinosaur fun we also had science which was all about the skeleton. We made comparisons between human and dinosaur bones, by estimating then measuring ourselves against the length of a dinosaur foot and the height of a dinosaur. 

For maths, we did some reasoning on odd and even numbers using dinosaur challenge cards. In Music we wrote our own lyrics for a diplodocus song and ended our lesson with some dinosaur rapping.  

Dinosaur art work has been so much fun this week! We've made and decorated flying dinosaurs, we designed front covers for our non-fiction dinosaur books. Using salt dough the children designed their own fossils, which Miss Hulbert took home to bake, they look amazing and you'd never believe they weren't millions of years old. 

Well done to our class dinosaur expert answering questions from Key Stage 2 children. They were very impressed and so were the teachers!

Here are some photographs from our showcase. Thank you to all the parents for visiting Jurassic Park at St Joseph’s.

Internet Safety Day

For Internet Safety Day we watched a short film about how important it is to be safe when we are using the internet and/or playing online games. It was clear in our group discussion afterwards, that in Year 2 we understand that we must tell a parent, carer or a trusted adult if someone, or something, makes us feel uncomfortable or worried. We designed posters to remind others how to keep safe. 

We had fun in the little bit of snow that we had in Otley.

RE

Palm Sunday

We’ve had a lovely week in Year 2, which started off on Monday with us leading the KS1 enactment of Palm Sunday. It was our turn to watch throughout the rest of the week as each class delivered the events leading to Jesus’ crucifixion. We were able to reflect on this as we completed the stages of the cross with Years 3 and 6 on Thursday.

Easter

On Wednesday we had an Easter crafts afternoon. We made beautiful Easter sunrise cards with chalk pastels. We painted and built Easter baskets and made chocolate Easter nests to fill them. 

The week ended with a wonderful mass, an Easter egg raffle and an exciting games afternoon. After all this fun and hard work we’re all ready for a break. We would like to wish you a happy Easter.

Lent

In preparation for the beginning of Lent next week, in our RE lesson we discussed the importance of Ash Wednesday and how it marks the beginning of 40 days of reflection and preparation. We wrote Lenten prayers to help us feeler closer to God.

Collective Worship

Lots of children have now been leaders of collective worship and what a fabulous job they have done. They have thoughtfully lead collective worship for Lent, Easter, different values and our weekly statements.

On St Joseph’s day we enjoyed taking part in Mass. We learned about the significance of St Joseph and reflected on his role of being Jesus’ foster father and how much he loved and cared for his family. We wrote about these special qualities and made beautiful cards. 

In RE we have been learning about Sikhism. We learned that Sikhs display their commitment to their beliefs by wearing the Sikh articles of faith. The five articles of faith start with the "k" alphabet in Punjabi, and are thereby referred to as the ‘5K’s.’

For Faith Fortnight we have learnt more about Sikhism. Sikhs worship at home and in the Sikh temple called the Gurdwara 'Gateway to the Guru' All Gurdwaras across the globe have: The Sikh scripture - Guru Granth Sahib and a Community Kitchen - Langar where food is cooked by the members of the community and served.  We shared our learning in the Faith Fortnight assembly.

In RE we listened to the story of one of Jesus’ miracles. Jairus was a Jewish religious leader who worshipped God and taught God’s words to others. When his daughter became ill and close to death, Jairus knew only one person could help her... When the girl died nobody believed that Jesus could bring her back to life. This miracle helped us to remember the power of Jesus’ wonderful love and to believe in Him.

PSHE

It was friendship Friday this week. We learned how to say compliments and how to be a good friend. We also thought about the mistakes we sometimes make and how to put those right. Here we are giving our friendship vouchers to each other.

English

We have been looking at the key features of a newspaper article, these include: headlines, by-line, the introduction (who, what when and where) body, quotes and photos/captions. Using the story from The Boy who Cried Wolf, as inspiration we practised writing punchy, exciting, headlines.

World Book Day celebrated in style with lots of fun reading activities.

In English, we have started a new unit of work on Beatrix Potter and we've been introduced to one of her most lovable (but mischievous) characters- Peter Rabbit. We have been writing and improving our sentences about poor old Mr McGregor, who has had quite enough of Peter Rabbit running riot through his vegetable patch! 
As inspiration for our work on Peter Rabbit, we made models of Mr McGregor’s garden. Using lots of different materials modelling clay, cardboard and different types of paper. We created beautiful, colourful models of Peter Rabbit’s favourite place. 
Our models were displayed on each of our tables and our writing in English this week focused on our senses. We wrote about all of the wonderful things you could see, hear, smell and taste in Mr McGregor’s garden.

We had so much fun learning the common exception words and homophones by playing all the amazing games the children made for their homework.

Our spelling and grammar focus this week has been on the apostrophe for contraction and the possesive apostrophe. We enjoyed word matching activities, which helped us to recognise words with the contracted apostrophe and to understand that the apostrophe replaces any missing letters to make a new word. We are now very good at using the possessive apostrophe in our writing too.

History

Our topic on People Who Have Made a Difference has been about the inspirational Rosa Parks. We learnt how her refusal to give up her seat to a white person on a segregated bus changed the rules of American society, and led towards equality and justice for everyone, whatever the colour of their skin. We learned the horrible histories song for our assembly.

We also learned how Florence Nightingale wouldn’t give up, being determined to improve the hospitals for soldiers in the Crimean war. We recited a poem to help us remember the story.

Mother Theresa was an inspirational person who made a difference too. We wrote and recited a poem for our assembly telling how she made a difference.

Here are some of our amazing time capsules and books about times in history when people made a difference.

Maths

We have been learned lots about fractions. We have consolidated our understanding of how to find a half and a quarter. Using this has helped us to find ¾ of a number. We have also looked at how to find a third. We have looked at finding fractions of amounts of money and measurements. Please can you help your children to practise their times tables (2,3,5 and 10) as quick recall really helps children with their understanding of fractions.

In Maths this week, we have been learning about the properties of 3D shapes. We learnt how to count the faces, edges and vertices of a cube, cuboid, cone, sphere, cylinder, square/triangular based pyramid and a triangular prism. See if your child can spot any of these 3D shapes around the home and quiz them on their properties.

Measurement lessons included length, weight and capacity.

This half term started with lots of multiplication and division. We enjoyed sharing beanbags into hoops on the carpet and writing division number sentences to match these.

In Maths, we’ve been practicing lots of arithmetic. As well as counting in steps of 2,3,5 and 10 by the end of Year 2, children should be secure with all of these X tables. We’ve listened to songs to help us memorise these and have started a new X table challenge called:'Times Tables Rockstars!' 

In Maths we have been learning about money. We brainstormed lots of vocabulary associated with money. We have practised adding different amounts of money and writing it as pence e.g. 124p and using decimal notation £1.24. This week in Maths, we have been spending all our money at Miss Hulbert’s ice cream parlour. We practised our addition skills by choosing from the menu (and for once we were allowed as many ice creams as we wanted)!

For our NSPCC number day we had lots of fun learning about symmetry and making our own symmetrical patterns. We enjoyed playing number games of Mathoply (which had lots of number challenges) and Dice Addition.

Science

We have been learning about the changes of state in Science. We definitely enjoyed our class based investigation, which involved us observing the changing state of popcorn when heat is applied. We were happy to discover that this was an irreversible change thus leaving only one way to dispose of the end product...

Our Science lesson on properties of materials this week was really fun. We carried out an investigation to find a suitable material for making an umbrella from. We predicted which materials would absorb water, which materials would repel water and which materials would absorb water.

We were able to get out and enjoy the wonderful sunshine this week as our Science lesson was all about Identifying, classifying and describing the materials around us. With our clipboards and I Pads we searched for wood, plastic, stone, metal and fabric.

PE

Well our week got off to a very energetic start on Monday with a skipping workshop. To help us prepare for our skipping festival in June, Jodi came along to help us with our technique and prepare us for the various routines that we will be performing.

Autumn Term

Christmas

Magical Christmas Journey Production

If you were able to join us on Tuesday for our ‘Magical Christmas Journey’ we’re sure you’ll agree that the children sang and acted their socks off! Thank you for all your support in making this happen, the outfits were fantastic and the children performed their roles brilliantly.

Christmas Party Day

We enjoyed some more Christmas crafts, when we made reindeer dust and painted our Santa hats in preparation for our Christmas party. Thank you for the donations of food, the party was lots of fun as always, we enjoyed lots of games especially playing ‘pass the parcel’ and musical Christmas statues.

Singing at the Christmas tree festival

On Thursday we walked to the Christmas Tree Festival at the parish church. The audience were treated to a fantastic selection of Christmas carols and as always praise was given to the St Joseph's children for their wonderful singing and behaviour. 

Friday was full of festive fun when we got to make Christmas crafts ready to decorate our Christmas tree, we also made, calendars and Christmas cards.

Magic Topic Week

How amazing our ‘Magic’ theme for topic week has been! After watching ‘Dazzling Darren’ on Monday, we were keen to find out how to entertain others with our own magic tricks... We’ve learnt how to do magic with: playing cards, pieces of string, cups and balls, paper clips and even climbing through pieces of A4 paper! 

 We’ve been very creative this week too, we made mythical creatures with paper plates. We learnt about optical illusions and created 3D hands. We decorated glass jars so that we can keep them as ‘magic memory’ jars. We wrote about some of our most magical memories and we now have a special place to keep them safe.

We also finished making and painting our mod-roc volcanoes. This was to enable us to make them erupt in our magical science lesson. Using bicarbonate of soda, vinegar, washing-up liquid and food colouring to create a chemical reaction. This was followed by making a gummy hand with gelatine, ‘elephant’s toothpaste’ from a yeast reaction and watching what happened when we created amazing rainbows from skittles and warm water.

We’ve reinforced our understanding of place value, when we unravelled the clues in our maths mystery: to find out who had bitten off all the legs of the gingerbread men!

Heritage Fortnight

We've been learning all about our heritage this week and we’ve really enjoyed finding out about the heritage of lots of children in Year 2. We certainly have an international class, with children whose families come from the: Philippines, Poland, Italy, Australia, Malta, South Africa, Ireland and India!  We designed beautiful and informative posters about India and learnt some fascinating facts. We cooked some delicious samosas and made a raita to accompany them. The best bit was tasting these in class. Luckily we made plenty to go home too!

PSHE

Odd Socks Day

For Anti-Bullying Week, we have talked about the importance of standing up to bullies. We learnt some fantastic ‘Odd Sock’ songs about being unique and choosing to respect the differences of others. 

Growth Mindset

Year 2 have had a wonderful start to the year. We have been thinking all about having a growth mindset and the things that we should think and say to be the very best that we can be. We made ourselves into growth mindset superheros.

RE

Advent and Christmas

In RE we were given our (secret) Advent Angels. We thought about the different ways we could share kind gestures or actions for that person. It could be to remember them in our prayers or make room for them at our lunch table. We wrote promises about how we hoped to achieve this throughout Advent. 

The Christmas story

As well as singing and acting out the Nativity for our production, we’ve also been writing about it in our RE lessons. The children obviously paid lots of attention as they have written an amazing re-telling of the story of Christ’s birth.  

Mass lead by Year2

Well done to Year 2 for their wonderful Mass. Fr Lawrie and Mrs Knight both commented on the children’s fantastic participation and beautiful reading.

Remembrance

Year 2 marked Remembrance day by writing poems about the things that we remmeber and painting poppies. They were very excited to receive their knitted poppies.

The Trinity

We have been learning about the Trinity. We thought about the different roles we have as: sons, daughters, siblings, nieces and nephews, whilst still being the same person. We can think about the Trinity in a similar way: as God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. We reflected on the different ways to describe God in his different forms and how we see Him as: a miracle maker, a cross carrier, a promise keeper, life keeper, fruit grower and a time starter were just a few of the ideas we discussed. 

Chosen People

We have been reading bible stories and learning how people are chosen by God. We learned about Moses and thought about the story from the viewpoint of Miriam. we used role play to retell Daniel and the lions.

Where is God?

We answered the question Where is God? by creating beautiful art work. The children wrote fantastic answers: “God is so near that it feels like he is next to me” “God’s love shines so brightly in all our hearts” God is with his angels watching over everyone in the world”

We though about the special gifts we have that we can shine brightly around the classroom and St Josephs school.

Harvest

In RE we have been learning all about Harvest and in art we finished our Harvest food pictures in preparation for our assembly on 5th October.

The children were amazing in our Harvest assembly. We used the letters in HARVEST to make other words to explain the meaning of harvest. We thanked God for all our wonderful food, well nearly all of it!

Thank you so much for the food and present donations from our Year 2 children, we have been overwhelmed with the generosity once again. The hampers have now been wrapped up and are ready to be delivered. 

Maths

To revise subtraction methods we had lots of fun trying to get Father Christmas to his workshop, landing on elf and reindeer cards on the way.

In Maths we have begun to look at multiplication. We have thought about different vocabulary for multiplication and used practical resources to help us with our understanding of 'equal groups' (repeated addition).  Just before the Christmas holidays we sang 2 and 5 times tables to the tune of Jingle Bells.

Maths has been full of lots of practical and outdoor activities to learn about place value and number. We’ve been learning about place value, enjoying how to find different ways to represent tens and ones using: number bead strings, numicon, counting towers and even straws!

Charlie Crocodile, who was swimming near our islands, helped us to understand greater than and less than.

We have used so many different ways to add tens and two digit numbers.

English

It’s been another busy week in Year 2. Our English lessons this week have been based on the story, ‘Harvey Slumfenburger’s Christmas Present.’ We thought about all the different ways that Father Christmas travelled to get to Harvey’s house. We used our brilliant imaginations to come up with some of our own fantastic ways to travel and wrote about these.

We have just enjoyed reading our new book Message in a Bottle which we are beginning to do lots of writing about. To get started the children designed the most imaginative islands that they would like to visit.

Here are some of out creative and imaginative islands.

We’ve learnt all about nouns in English and had lots of fun learning about some of the unusual words for collective nouns. Did you know that a group of parrots is known as a ‘pandemonium?’ 

Spelling

There are so many words to learn to spell! Here we are playing matching pairs and using homophones in sentences.

Geography and History

This week in Year 2 we have learnt so much about our amazing town of Otley. Whilst exploring we visited: Otley Bridge and found a monument of The Wharfedale Printing Press and a sun dial, we found out what life was like at the Courthouse, we visited the Methodist church, the Parish Church and the Jubilee Clock Tower. With our heads bursting with facts we began to make our pop-up books of Otley.

For our topic lesson, Explorer Bear let us have a look in his backpack and we found a compass, so it was off outside again to practice our navigational skills. From the playground we learnt which direction was north, south, east and west.

Here is some of our wonderful homework exploring alsorts of wonderful places.

Science

Year 2 have made the most of the late September sunshine this week and in our science lesson on Habitats we have enjoyed building ‘Bug Hotels.’ Branches, leaves and pebbles were just a few of the materials we used to create the perfect habitat for our creatures. 

In science we were able to explore outside in the sunshine; our task was to sort and label items into ‘alive’ and ‘never alive.