Ideas of activities that can be done as part of your day together can be found here. Please do contact me through the googleclassroom stream to let the class know of any activities that have worked well for you and your family.

There is obviously an understanding relating to the activities listed below that these are only suggested activities as resources may well be reduced or unavailable at this time.

Some ideas, all on a handy A4 sheet can be found here: https://mcusercontent.com/35a57192e9ec6a559eaaa6cf9/files/ca721c01-dadb-4434-89ff-be64f1f19aa8/20_Activities_to_try_at_home.pdf

Being creative

This is an task to do when you are feeling in the mood for a peaceful, creative activity.
Design a rainbow piece of artwork that you can put up in your window to make your neighbours smile as they go past doing their daily exercise.
You can let your imagination run wild by using paint, pens, coloured pieces of paper or card (these could be cut off your magazines, paper or boxes before they go into your recycling box if you don’t have any paper), sequins or anything else that you think would make a wonderfully beautiful rainbow to bring happiness to your families and neighbours.
If you upload your photos onto the Year 2 stream of the googleclassroom, I will add them to a class slide presentation, so that we can enjoy each other’s artwork.

Prayerlife

I have asked the children to keep one another in their daily prayers and suggested that at the end of the day, they could name each of the children who sit at their table in their prayers. We reflected on how lovely it would feel to know that every day, we are all being prayed for. Please support your child to remember their friends, including those on their learning table in their prayers each night.

Daily prayers can also be found here https://www.tentenresources.co.uk/primary-subscription/prayers-for-home/

The Scouts have produced a list of 100 free activities, games and craft ideas. All the activities are designed to have a clear positive outcome, such as developing communication skills or learning how to solve problems.
https://www.scouts.org.uk/the-great-indoors

Cook/prepare meals with your child and as you do so, think about the following:

• Talk about the different parts of the meal and how they fit in with the Eat Well Plate, which can be found here: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/the-eatwell-guide/.  What types of food are you eating? Is it protein, carbohydrate, fruit, vegetable or dairy? Talk about the healthy and not so healthy parts of the meal.
• Make sandwiches with your child.  Let them think about the different fillings that they could include?  How could they vary the content?  Encourage children to make their own fillings such as …
• egg with mayo (try growing your own cress to go into these sandwiches)
• tuna with mayo
• meat and salad
• grate cheese/chop tomatoes for cheese and tomato etc. etc.

• Use scales and measuring jugs to measure out ingredients, encouraging pupils to read the measures and think about what each unit of measurement is worth.  Questioning could include How much more do we need?  If we double the recipe, what ingredients will we need?  The bread will prove for two hours and then bake for an hour and a half.  What time will the bread be ready?
• Read the packaging on your shopping.  What is the country of origin?  How do you think that this product arrived in this country?  Trace a product’s journey on a world map.  Which has travelled the furthest?  etc.

The Change for Life website has activities for all the family, including fun food facts, and recipes.   https://www.nhs.uk/change4life 

Learn to tell the time to the nearest five minutes. 

• The best way to do this is by frequently referring to an analogue clock throughout the day, asking what the time is and further questions such as:
• We’re going to have lunch in twenty minutes.  What time will we have lunch?
• The cake will take two hours to cook.  What time will it be ready?
• We have been playing with the Lego for forty five minutes.  What time did we start? etc etc. etc.

Sow seeds

• Great seeds to grow at this time of year are cress (perfect for those egg sandwiches), salad leaf, marigold and pea seeds.   Talk with your child about what the seed will need to germinate and then measure/monitor the growth of the seedlings.  A key element of Year Two learning in Plants is considering what happens if plants don’t have water or light, so consider doing an investigation by putting some seedlings in the dark or don’t water some seedlings and see what happens to them.  Take some photos to show the growth/changes etc.

Keeping active

Joe Wicks is doing a daily PE workout at 9am. This is uploaded to his youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAxW1XT0iEJo0TYlRfn6rYQ

If you join imoves at the following address, you will have access to videos, music and lesson plans for activities to do with your child. https://imoves.com/imovement-signup

Why not have a go at indoor monopoly?  This looks great fun.  If you don’t have access to a printer, your child could make a portable set that consists of cards written out with each of the activities which could be lain out in a board shape (or any shape your wish!) to travel along using a counter and dice.   Just do the action when you land on your written card.  Amend the activity as you wish and enjoy! https://mcusercontent.com/35a57192e9ec6a559eaaa6cf9/files/0852e3f0-ec76-494d-b704-f7d33a23f0b6/Active_

Reading

Hertfordshire Online library services:  You can borrow eBooks and audiobooks FREE from Hertfordshire Public Libraries using the BorrowBox app, your library card number
and your PIN. Anyone can join Hertfordshire Libraries if they live, work or study in the area.
If you’re not already a member, you can join online (google ‘join
Herts library’) then email libraries.information@hertfordshire.gov.uk

Go to: https://www.booksfortopics.com/year-2 to find recommendations of good reads for Year Two children.

Go to https://stories.audible.com/discovery and listen to some smashing stories together. If at all possible try to listen to them first to check that you are happy with the content.

Go to Curriculum Visions to access books suitable for your child to read with you. Go through the library shelves, looking for books that are at a similar colour to your child’s book band. A guide to the book banding can also be found on the site. Please note that this certainly does not replace sitting and reading a real book, but is somewhere that you can find limited, additional reading material, should you have exhausted your own supplies of lovely books to read at home. I will continue to search for sources of other reading material that you may be able to use.

Go to https://www.curriculumvisions.com/indexHomeScreen.html

Username: stadrians/0001
Password: jungle

Well being

Please see the Wellbeing post below to find lots of activities that will support your child’s wellbeing.

Maths

There is a wealth of maths activities on the Year 2 googleclassroom. Once you have completed all of these, please do feel free to complete any of the tasks on the Fluency Teaser blog which can be found in the menu on the right.

English

Mrs Hayes’s English group: We are finishing our teaching sequence on Wolves. The children are writing their own non-fiction booklet on Wolves. Our spelling learning focus includes reinforcing the Year 1 and Year 2 common exception words as well as single and plural spelling patterns i.e. scarf/scarves; puppy/puppies; bridge/bridges etc.

Maths

Mrs Hayes’s Maths Group: We are finishing off our topic on Fractions and beginning our learning on Money. We will be working with coins to solve word problems up to £1. We thought about all the different ways that we can pay for a £1 Sport Relief badge.

Mr King’s Maths Group have been doing it the other way around! Having finished off our topic on money we are now starting to look at fractions. So far we have looked at recognising equal parts, then finding one half, one quarter and three quarters of shapes. We plan to go on and look at finding thirds of a shape, looking at how two quarters and one half are equivalent, and then learning to find halves, quarters and thirds of amounts (e.g. half of 8 is 4, one quarter of 8 is 2).

Science

We are continuing with our learning on Plants. We carefully drew and labelled a strawberry plant and predicted what will happen as the plant grows through the next month. Next, we will be exploring the marigold plants that were sown by the children six weeks ago. The children each have their own seedling (3-4cm tall at the moment) and they will track it’s growth across the next month on a bar chart. Building on from learning that took place last autumn, the children will also set up an investigation to explore what happens to plants grown without water or plants grown without light.

Computing

We are introducing our We are Programmers unit, currently focusing on directions i.e. Go forward two steps, make a quarter turn to the right, go forward three steps etc.

Design and Technology

We have been setting up our sewing kits, ready to begin learning how to do a running stitch. As we will not be having parent helpers in school for the foreseeable future, children will bring these kits home to complete them there. If you child is not in school to receive a kit, feel free to practise running stitch on material or binca. The aim of the sewing activity is that the children will learn how to thread a needle independently, tie a knot in the end of the wool and then complete a running stitch.

History

We have been exploring a hundred year old family photo to see what we can find out. We have been thinking about the questions ‘What do you know/think/want to find out in relation to this photo.

Religious Education

We have just started our new topic: Opportunities. We are thinking about how Mothering Sunday gives us an opportunity to think about why our mother is so special to us. We have written messages relating to this theme and are practising our Mother’s Day song. During the week, we will be thinking about our journey through Lent and renewing our wish to help others.

On Wednesday, the children celebrated a liturgy with Father Francis. The focus of the liturgy was thanksgiving and the children enjoyed planning prayers, readings and hymns that they would use within the liturgy. It was a joyous occasion and the children prayed thoughtfully and sang with gusto!

How to access our Google Classroom

In the event of school closure, I am hoping to provide activities via the Google classroom. It might be worth checking that your child is able to access this in case we are instructed by the Government to close in the coming weeks. Further details can be found below.

To access Google classroom, children will need to sign in using their school Google account.

Visit google.com and click ‘Sign in’ in the top-right of the webpage.

If you, or someone using the same device, already has a Google account, you will need to add your child’s school account and switch between them before accessing the Classroom.  

How to add Google accounts

1. Open the Chrome web browser.
2. On the top right, select your profile image or initial.
3. On the menu, choose Add account.
4. Follow the instructions to add your child’s Google account.
5. Children’s school Google usernames all end with the domain, @stadrians.herts.sch.uk
6. Your child should know the first part of their username and the password.
   For security, I cannot add that information here. Further details can be found in your child’s reading log.

Once you have, set up your child’s Google account. You may need to switch between accounts for them to access the Google Classroom.

How to switch between Google accounts

1. In the top right, click your profile photo or email address.
2. Click the account you want to use.
3. A new window will open for this account.

Accessing the Google Classroom

Visit classroom.google.com 

The children have made a very happy start to Year 2 and we are all having a wonderful time as we get to know each other and start our new topics.

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It was lovely to see so many Year 2 parents on Monday 9th September. Notes from the meeting can be found below:

Date for your diary: KS1 Christmas play on 12th December at 7pm