Author: Mrs Hayes

We had a great time on World Book Day, celebrating our love of books, reading and writing. The day started with an opportunity to show off our outfits in a whole school assembly, followed by a shared reading session with our Year 6 buddies. After sharing poems with a friend, we then explored rhyming words and wrote our own amazing poems that we published in a class book. We also created our own beautiful bookmarks that we will be able to use in our favourite books. We have all brought a poetry book home, so our next challenge is to learn a poem to recite to our friends.

This week, we had lots of fun as we took part in our Big Lent Walk with Mrs Porter. We walked (or ran!) for 25 minutes and everyone covered a distance of at least two kilometres each. We are very proud of ourselves.

Please help us to raise money for CAFOD by going onto our school fundraising page, where you can see a record of the walk that we did together. You can find the fundraising page here: https://cafod.enthuse.com/pf/aideen-porter

This week, as part of the NSPCC Number Day, we had great fun exploring the multilink to create arrays using the number 12. We found twelve different multiplication and division facts for the number and then used what we had learned about 12 to help find out how many different groups we could share 30 into. Now that is great maths!

Once we’d had fun with the cubes, we logged onto the numbots website and solved lots of equations, so that we could earn gold coins and make our robots look better and better. We are getting really quick at solving addition and subtraction equations.

To end our wonderful number day, we had a maths quiz that gave us clues which helped us to crack the code.   The mystery message was Speak out, Stay safe, something that we should all do. We held out our hand and talked about the five people we can all talk to when we have something that we need to say.

The Year 2 children have been incredible this half term. There has been lots of illness, but the children have been resilient and showed just how brilliant they are as they persevered through rehearsals when, on a number of occasions, a third of the characters were ill! We are all very proud of the wonderful production that they put on during the last week of term and the singing was joyful. Well done Year 2!

Mrs McAllister and I would like to warmly thank you for the smashing gifts that we received at the end of the term. We are very lucky to have such generous families. Have a very happy, healthy and holy Christmas.

Here is a very special Christmas message from Year 2 to celebrate the end term.

As part of our their learning in Design Technology, we have been exploring structures. Having discovered that a structure needs to have a flat base in order to be stable, we then explored cylinders as so many of the strong and stable structures that we have found are made of cylinders (just take a look at our playground climbing frame).

We learned how to create a cylinder out of a rectangle and were amazed to find out just how strong and stable a cylinder can be. Our challenge was to find out how many books our homemade cylinders could hold and some carried over 50 books. What a strong structure a cylinder is and that explains why our table and chair legs are cylindrical shaped!

Our final challenge was to design and create a chair for a bear. Having explored different structures, we set up our design criteria first. For a chair to be effective, it needed to be stable so that the bear did not fall off! We had great fun developing our joining techniques, adapting our ideas as we worked together and then tested our chairs to see if we had created a stable structure.

We are very proud of the final results as we all used card and sellotape to create a chair that a bear could sit on without falling off.

We now have a wonderful new library in school and it is great to be able to spend time in our library, sharing books with friends and listening to a special story being read. Look in your child’s book bag to find a new library book that they have chosen to bring home and enjoy sharing with their family.

Next week, we are excited to be welcoming Isabel Thomas to our school. Isabel is an award-winning children’s author and science writer. Isabel will be sharing her experiences as a writer with us on Tuesday afternoon and she will also open our new library. There will be a chance to purchase some of Isabel’s fantastic books and get them signed by the author. You can learn more about Isabel’s books and her work on her website:  https://isabelthomas.co.uk/

On top of all that has been happening this week, our fantastic school council organised a mufti-day and art competition in support of children in need. The children looked great and had a brilliant day. Well done, everyone!

Next week, as we prepare to mark the start of Advent, we will be making decorations to get our classroom ready for Christmas. If you have any unwanted decorations that you are able to donate to our class, it will add a spark of Christmas cheer to the weeks ahead.

This week, the children have been learning about Walter Tull, who is remembered for being one of the first professional black footballers (he played for Tottenham Hotspur) and he was also the first black army officer. The children developed their skills of historical enquiry when exploring a range of artefacts from over one hundred years ago. We had to decide whether they could have been found in Walter Tull’s suitcase or not and this resulted in lots of great discussions. We learned that Walter was recommended for a medal of bravery, but he died in the First World War and this knowledge made our Remembrance Dad service even more poignant.