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The children completed sewing their cushions today and they look fantastic! Just as importantly, the children showed amazing perseverance and teamwork in completing them. Today we talked about how well they did when things didn’t go well, when they had had problems and what they did to overcome them. Everyone did this with this sewing projects and the next time the children encounter setbacks or disappointments they should remember the tenacity and determination they used in their sewing and channel that energy into the new problem. The children could all name the skills they have learnt and improved. The cushions will come home after they’ve been displayed in the classroom.

The red, white and blue clothes looked stunning today. Here they all are, in red, white and blue in front of their red, white and blue display. Every child has a painting in the montage.

We’ve still been learning about light and dark in Science and this week explored how fabrics can be transparent, translucent and opaque – it’s only opaque materials which make shadows by blocking the light completely. The children worked out that the properly cut out all light and make good shadows they would need to use two fabrics together – just like lined curtains do. These photos show the children carrying out an investigation to see how light only travels in straight lines. They needed to line up the holes in the card exactly so see the light shining through. If card was in front of the light a shadow was created because the card is opaque.

We’ve continued to learn about North and South America in Geography and debugging in Computing. Next half-term there will be new topics in each subject – a new book in English and a new topic of fractions in Maths. It’s been a busy half-term and the children never cease to impress me with their marvellous co-operation, love of learning and enthusiasm for everything at the school. Wishing you all a safe, happy – and warm! – half-term holiday and I look forward to seeing everyone on ten days – on Tuesday 7th June.

As part of our Platinum Jubilee activities this week, we have created an amazing display to show just how grateful we are to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. Thank you Ma’am.

We watched a great cartoon in which Queen Elizabeth’s beautiful hat is blown off her head by a gust of wind. Off trot a loyal guard and a cheeky corgi to see if they can rescue the hat. This was the stimulus for our own stories and our next task was to create a story that told what happens next. We had great fun writing our stories, which showed just how good we are at creative writing, spellings, handwriting and punctuation now! For our maths challenge, we thought about the number 70 and all the different ways we could make 70, using the number skills that we have developed this year.

Click on the link below, if you would like to watch this lovely Platinum Jubilee cartoon at home.

Along with Year 2 children across the nation, throughout the month of May, we have been involved in lots of end of Key Stage practical activities and written assessments to show just how much we have learned during our time in Key Stage One. We have worked very hard and to celebrate our achievements, we all enjoyed a delicious ice lolly together, in the beautiful bee and butterfly garden that we have created.

It’s been great to see the children enjoying themselves in the sunshine outside this week, at last. We’ve had other welcome changes from routine and exciting events. Hot on the tails of the new listening post was the delivery of seven brightly-coloured beanbag cushions so the children can now sit in comfort as they giggle to Roald Dahl stories.

In another new project, after experimenting with stitches, the children planned their designs for their little pillows. They had great ideas, from Star Wars, to football, to playing cards.

On Wednesday we joined in the National Numeracy live stream doing a times table number roll and helped set a new world record for the number of participants. This is what we joined and watched – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhaAYFHE724 It was amazing to be part of something nationwide and we have learnt a new rhyme for times-tables.

The R E homework looks fantastic on the wall – every piece is different; and the children are enjoying appreciating each other’s and sharing how they chose to present their understanding. We have now started the new topic of Resolution and I’ll post the new home learning over the next few days

We started the new “Resolution” topic with role-play about a situation involving choices and consequences, which the children threw themselves into.

Our new book is “Flotsam”, a fascinating story about a boy’s adventures at the seaside. It’s being a springboard for fronted adverbials, powerful verbs and expanded noun phrases, which the children will weave into stories next week. The children are being adventurous in their use of language and we are also focusing on thoroughly understanding and using the basics of English – nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, prepositions, the core building blocks.

Next week we will be celebrating the Jubilee and we’re all looking forward to seeing the costumes people choose to wear on Friday.

Have a great weekend!

We love maths every day, but Wednesday was a particularly joyful day, because we were involved in creating a new Guinness World Record as part of an online community of 5362 schools around the country!

The day began with a warm up activity led by Katya Jones, of Strictly Come Dancing fame. That was very exciting, but only the starter as we then joined in with a mass chant focussing on the 5 times table. This was a great way to show that learning times tables can be fun and we were overjoyed when we discovered that enough schools had joined in with the live stream to make a new world record. Throughout the day, we then took part in lots of activities linked to the 2, 5 and 10 times tables. As a finale, we all brought a certificate home to show just how clever we are!

If you would like to join in with the National Numeracy number heroes competition, please follow the link below, where you will find more details: https://www.nationalnumeracy.org.uk/number-heroes-competition

The children have got through the weeks of SATs. They were magnificent in their positive attitudes. The children have worked so hard and have all done their very best. We are very proud of them all.

During the afternoons, we have had some time to do lots of writing activities. In RE, the children wrote radio scripts for an interviewer to interview St Stephen and investigate why and how he was so brave to stand up for his faith despite being persecuted and threatened with death. The children learned he was in fact the first martyr for the christian faith. The Holy Spirit gave him the courage to speak up for what he believed was right and to share his faith with the people who were attacking him.

The children used their scripts to role play their interviews. They displayed great knowledge and empathy for St Stephen.

Today, the children had a relaxed day having studied so hard for their SATs. Rounders and other games were played, the school provided an ice-lolly for each child and much fun was had by all.

Over the weekend, the children will be busy packing their suitcases for our residential trip to the Isle of Wight.  We will endeavour to post pictures on this class page through the course of the week but priority will be given to ensuring all children and staff are safe.

Please pray for good weather, happy and healthy children and staff and safe journeys there and back.

We are all overjoyed to finally receive our set of new reading books. Here we are, juggling with five books each – it was trickier than we thought to hold the books out and look at the camera at the same time! We shall enjoy reading them at home along with a library book that we choose from our Top 50 reads for Year 2. There are so many books to choose from!

Year 2 Wish list

In preparation for our May Day liturgy, we wrote prayers asking for help as we try to keep the peace in our own lives. Here are our beautiful Mary, Queen of Peace posters that we were very proud to show everyone in school. Thank you so much for contributing such wonderful plants for our floral display. We shall enjoy planting and caring for them and then watching them grow across the next few months.

We started May with the beautiful Crowning of Mary. Year 3 drew very careful pictures of the saints for our contribution “Mary, Queen of All Saints”. We talked about saints important to us, such St Adrians and St Albans of course, British and Irish patron saints, St Nicholas and St Francis. Several children in the class reminded us they are named for saints, too.

We celebrated class worship in the hall at the altar of Mary. They children sang Ave Maria, with the harmony very nicely.

The flowers and plants the children brought in looked beautiful and really made it feel like spring could be here. We will continue to mark the month of May with activities.

Last week, year 3 completed the daily mile like other children did. Here they are enjoying the feel-good effect of exercise and exertion.

We are continuing to explore the feelings and events of The Pentecost. The children were thinking and writing about what the disciples would have felt after the Holy Spirit passed over them. They are developing a clearer understanding of how to answer the big question “What’s the use of energy?”

Last week we explored what the experiences of Resurrection and Ascension may have been like for Jesus’ followers by “hot-seating. ” A disciple kindly came to visit us and we asked him and her questions about their emotions and reactions at the events. Here is one of the followers answering questions.

We saw a few pieces of RE homework today, where the children have thought deeply about the subject and used the symbols of the dove and the flame to illustrate their work. Well done and we look forward to seeing more next week.

The children are improving, daily, to say the time correctly. The challenge this week was to say the same time in different ways – eg 11.43am, 11.43 in the morning, 17 minutes to twelve in the morning, 17 minutes before 12 am. An interesting question discussed was – Is twelve o’clock at night am or pm?

We all continue to be intrigued by the mysterious illustrations in “The Mysteries of Harris Burdock”, experimenting with different words and phrases to write alternative titles and captions for chosen pictures.

It’s great to see the children, coatless, racing around on the field. Let’s hope this sunny weather continues. Have a lovely weekend.

We have kept ourselves very fit this week and enjoyed running the Golden Mile. We learned that if we run around the junior field eight times, we will have run a mile. Well done to all of the children who challenged themselves to keep running as far as they could. The children also enjoyed the wonderful new playground markings and each day, it is great to see them developi all kinds of fun and imaginative games to keep themselves active! Added to this, the children were very pleased to go to the swimming pool again this week and it was brilliant to see how any initial nerves from the first visit had disappeared and the children were super excited! What great resilience, everyone!

We have been learning about life cycles, so it has been wonderful this week to see chicks hatch out of their eggs and listen to their sweet tweetings. As part of this learning, the children have created slide presentations that show animal life cycles. The children have worked hard to learn how to insert images, shapes and text boxes and organise where they are on the page, so that the slide shows the life cycle clearly. It has been wonderful to see the children’s computing skills develop across the week. When they are next on the Googleclassroom, ask your child to show your their lifecycles, which can be found in the Year 2 Classwork section.

.. with a shout ! Year 3 – or Raven Tribe – marched enthusiastically into Celtic Harmony this morning. They had to shout their name to make sure they travelled safely back to the prehistoric times as they passed through the gates. And what a world of Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages awaited us! The setting is beautiful and peaceful, with artefacts galore and scenes and buildings recreated as they would have been in prehistoric times; and everything explained in detail and with good humour by our educator guide for the day, Fei.

Events which took place over nearly 100, 000 years were put into context by creating a timeline with objects. We then went into the woods and watched Fei do some flint knapping and then the children made their own “soap arrows”. They were also very excited to see Fei showing us a long and a shorter spear as well as a stone axe. Fei was very impressed by the class’s knowledge that obsidian is the sharpest stone known. The class’s understanding and knowledge of the period generally was impressive.

The children then helped Fei rebuild part a wattle fence which had come down. He was able to jump up and down on the fences built by Raven Tribe so their weaving must be good!

Lunch was outdoors and everyone ate heartily. After lunch the children became completely engrossed in making clay coil pots, which will be dry enough to take home on Friday or Monday. We were also treated to different (replica) prehistoric pots with their different features explained well by Fei.

Lastly, the children learnt about prehistoric farming and the hugely significant change from hunter-gathering to farming methods of getting food. They used stone querns to grind grain and then mixed flour with water to make Neolithic-style bread. There was definitely no danger of putting on weight from bread in the New Stone Age. The effort and time needed to make the flour are huge and the resulting amount of flour tiny. The children’s opinions are below, but this was my favourite part of the day, because of the amazing team-work and co-operation the children showed. The relatively small space was a hive of activity with every child happy engaged in the tasks, problem-solving, communicating and completely focused on carrying out what had been asked.

After these four highly enjoyable activities, we came back to the twenty-first century and walked back down the lane – just slightly slower than the first time- back to the coach and then school. I think everyone will be sleeping well tonight. Possibly including the fantastic, committed Mums who came to help. Thank you so much as without your commitment, learning like this wouldn’t be possible. The children were a credit to the school. It is really marvellous to be back to learning in as many different ways as possible.

When back at school, we reflected on what we had seen and done that day; and specifically what we enjoyed most. Maeve – “I liked the dough balls best. I liked making them and squashing them. They felt really squishy. ” Several other children agreed with this. Austin liked the weaving which “used all your strength”. Like many other children, Aiden enjoyed making the clay pots best of all. Jack B said, “Doing the pattern was really good.” Gabriel couldn’t choose one thing because he loved all the activities. Darragh said “It was really fun when you went in the roundhouse”. We agreed that what made the activities special was the fact that we did them in authentic locations. The roundhouse were the clay took place had a (small, raised and enclosed) fire so you really got an idea of what it was like to live stone-age style. Mrs Porter knew we’d returned from the trip because she could smell the smoky smell coming from the classroom! Some children, like Aidan, would’ve liked a go at other activities we saw evidence of, like the den-building.

We all enjoyed meeting Gerald, who is the resident pheasant, not a wild cockrel as originally thought. He is really very striking.

A great day was had by all; and everyone is looking forward to more enrichment days like this!