Over the last few weeks, we have been using games, programmable toys and online coding games to explore algorithms. We have created our own algorithms, tried them out, spotted problems and then debugged our programmes to make sure that they work. This has involved lots of mistakes, discussions and problem solving, which has been great fun!
Year 2 are thoughtful artists
Inspired by the amazing artist, Charles McGee, the children have been exploring colours, patterns and shapes to create their own artwork using pens, charcoal and sculpture. Here is a selection of the tremendous artwork that we are thoughtfully making during our art project. Our next challenge is to create 3D sculptures using our drawings. Watch this space to see what comes next!
Year Two wish you a very Happy New Year!
The children are enjoying being back at school and are very happy to be able to play with their friends. Here we all our, out and about enjoying each other’s company as we welcome in 2024.
Year 2 wish you a very merry Christmas
The children have had a lovely final week of Advent in school. We started the week with our tea party during which the children had great fun making angels with grandparents and family members and they were very excited to sing their favourite songs from our Christmas play of Babushka.
The children have had to exercise lots of patience this week as under the Christmas tree there has been a gift waiting for each and every one of them. On Thursday, we had a reflective class liturgy, where the children told each other what was so special about them as a friend and then exchanged their kriskringle gifts. This celebration ended with a shared glorious snack, which the children were very excited about too!
Mrs McAllister and I would like to express our sincere thanks for the kind and thoughtful gifts that we have received at the end of this time. We wish you a very merry Christmas and a truly happy and peaceful New Year!
Year 2 love to perform
During December, the children have shown that they love to perform! We started the month with a glorious concert led by the Rock Steady bands and had a wonderful display by the Cheerleading club. Our final performance was in the smashing story of Babushka, our Christmas play that traditionally ended up in Bethlehem celebrating the birth of Jesus. The children are very proud of their singing and acting skills and so are we! Well done to you all.
Advent in Year 2
As part of our RE Preparations topic, we have created an advent wreath filled with our advent prayers. We held a thoughtful class liturgy during which we shared these prayers with God and enjoyed singing our Advent candles song together. This week, we lit the purple candle and thought about the prophet Isaiah’s message that ‘Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given’ as we get ready to celebrate Jesus’ birthday on Christmas day.
Year 2 love maths
We have had great fun learning about equal groups and how they can be used to make arrays. We used these arrangements to count in 2s, 5s and 10s and even learned some multiplication table raps. We are getting really good at using counters and real objects to help us to solve our multiplication problems.
Year 2 get building
(Please see last week’s post to find out what we did to start our Structures topic). The next step in our Design and Technology project was to create a chair for a bear that followed our designs. We used what we had learned about structures to write clear success criteria and we had to make sure that the chair was stable and strong, so that the bear did not fall off. We worked well as a team and once our chairs were completed, we found out how many bears our chairs would hold. Some chairs held as many as 34 bears without collapsing. This shows once again what strong structures cylinders are!
Design and Technology in Year 2
We have had great fun exploring structures, especially thinking about what makes a structure stable. We used construction materials to build our own models and discovered that cylinders are particularly strong structures. We found many manmade structures like climbing frames, slides, tables and chairs used cylinders. To find out why, we created our own cylinders and discovered that they could hold many things. One cardboard cylinder was strong enough to hold a table tray! Our next challenge is to use what we have learned to design our own chair for a bear and then create it out of card.
Year 2 get sewing!
As part of their learning in Design and Technology, the Year Two children have been working really hard, developing their sewing skills. They have learned how to thread a needle and also join two pieces of material together as they created their own piece of bunting. Each triangle has its own letter and the children have decorated their bunting very imaginatively with sequins. I wonder what message the letters will have once they are all joined together?
