Class 2 Blog

We have been very busy in lots of areas of the curriculum this week, in our first full week back. here’s a quick round up of what we have been up to. Firstly Class 2 started their dance unit in PE, based on Thriller by Michael Jackson. They have really enjoyed creating their monster moves!

In English, the children have been highly engaged in retelling the story of the Dragon Machine and have been amazing in their ability to recall the key events of the story (plus they are still looking for dragons everywhere!)

In maths we have continued with developing our multiplication skills and it has been great to see so many of you accessing TT Rockstars. We also held our school maths open morning this week. Thank-you to all that attended, please do contact us if you have any queries about any aspects of the year 2 maths curriculum.

In computing, we have started using the program 2Paint a Picture. This week we have focused on creating the Impressionist style of painting. The children loved creating their artwork and you can see some of their work below.

In science the children have been investigating what materials are suited to different purposes including looking at why some objects can be made form different types of materials but not all materials are suitable for all objects. For example, a spoon might be made of plastic, metal or wood but not chocolate! see below for this week’s homework relating to science.

Reading:

This week, we saw an improvement in our home-reading scores. 74% of us read 3 times or more at home this week! This was lovely to see. We have got lots of lovely reading books going home at the moment and those children reading regularly are really enjoying choosing from our every changing class library. Please make sure you read 3 times this week, to keep our upwards momentum going!

Spelling:

This week our spellings focus on homophones and near homophones. Our daily practice as soon as the children come in at 8.45 is really helping with consolidating learning in spelling. The spelling quiz and practice template can be accessed on the Purple Mash class 2dos.

Homework:

To consolidate our science work for this week and to practise your writing skills, can you complete this diary about the wrong materials. This will be available on Seesaw as a template that you can write on or you can use a paper copy that will be sent home on Monday. Please return your science homework by Monday 27th January. We look forward to letting you share your work with the rest of the class and we will add some of your work to our science wall in the classroom.

It has been lovely to see everyone back in school this week looking super smart and ready to learn. We have loved hearing about everything you got up to during the holidays. It sounds like Santa really enjoyed reading those amazing letters that you wrote him at the end of last term.

We have lots of exciting learning opportunities for you this term so look out for the class newsletter that should be in your bookbags today. It will also be posted on Seesaw. We will be sending TT Rockstars logins home this week and showing you how to access the website, the practice arenas and any battles that are set up. We know lots of you have been very keen to get started with this! As our maths unit this half-term will be multiplication and division, accessing TT Rockstars will really help with your quick recall of the 2, 5 and 10 times tables. It will also help you to speed up and be more confident in answering the times tables questions on our daily maths quickstarts.

We will also be sending you home some fish! These are actually the templates for the year 1 and year 2 common exception word spellings. Our suggestion is that you pick two colours. Colour half of each word in that you can confidently read then colour the other half in when you can confidently spell it. Pin your fish somewhere where you won’t forget about them – like the front of the fridge or a noticeboard – and keep coming back to them regularly to update your progress. You can always send us photos of your fish via Seesaw as we would love to see how you are getting on.

Spellings

This week your spellings all end in ‘le’. You all thoroughly enjoyed playing a dice game to practise the spellings (below). Why don’t you have a go with a guardian or sibling? How many other ways can you find to practise these words at home?

Reading

This week we 2 scored a very beatable 64% on our home-reading. Next week all of us will be coming home with new phonics, guided reading, or reading for pleasure books. Please make sure we all read three times at home and get a parent to record it in your reading log. We are more than happy for you to write your own comment about what you have read and whether you enjoyed the book!

Dragons, dragons everywhere!

This week we have started a story in Literacy all about dragons. Since then we have been finding evidence of dragons everywhere! If you go out an about this weekend, please take the time to see whether you can spot any dragons hiding in plain sight.

Wow just wow! What an amazing Autumn term we have had class 2 and it has absolutely flown by. You have all been absolute stars on your learning journey this term and you have had so much enthusiasm for all aspects of the curriculum. From farm visits and village walks to author visits in the classroom and the Ladies in Pigs too, then there has been practising and performing the Christmas play and all of the challenging work you have completed across the curriculum. This week you became a chef extraordinaire when you completed your food technology work by making pumpkin soup, carrot soup and freshly baked bread. Your parents really enjoyed this treat at the Key Stage One performances and have given you some excellent feedback. Well done, all of that chopping, peeling, grating, kneading and shaping was worth it. A really big well done from us for all of your hard work and effort, we are really proud of you. Congratulations to Nancy, Emma and Leo, our end of term certificate winners for attainment, effort and behaviour. Class 2 you gave us a very hard job trying to choose just three people so it’s a good job we will be able to give out more certificates at the end of the Spring and Summer terms too.

We are looking forward to sharing our new, exciting Spring curriculum with you. Until then, three more sleeps until Santa visits, how exciting! We hope you have a fantastic school holiday with your families and we look forward to hearing all about it when you come back to school in January 2024. New Year – New Term, New learning opportunities and lots of fun to be had!

If mummies and daddies are a little busy in the next few days, you will find a few Christmas activities on Purple Mash and Seesaw to keep you busy too, but you don’t have to do these if you don’t want to. We would really love it if you keep up with your reading though, especially if you get any exciting books for Christmas and then you can tell us about them when we next see you.

Lots of love

Mrs Platten and Mrs Joplin

It has been such a busy week in class 2. There has been an absolute whirlwind of activity. Firstly the children finished off their letters to Santa and posted them in the class post box which was very exciting for them. They have also been experimenting with printing techniques to produce some highly original and individual Christmas cards which are looking fantastic. On Tuesday Key Stage One performed their school play to the rest of the school. Despite being a little nervous at having a live audience, they all sang and danced their hearts out and said their lines very clearly. We very much look forward to welcoming you to watch the performance on either Tuesday or Wednesday next week. All tickets have been allocated. On Wednesday it was Christmas Dinner Day with most children choosing to enjoy one of Mrs Gell’s delicious school dinners with roast turkey and all the trimmings follow by a snowman biscuit. All of the children looked amazing in their festive Christmas jumpers and they enjoyed pulling crackers with their friends.

No homework this week other than to read at least three times and to do some final practising of your lines for the play. Do look out for some optional festive activities that will appear on Seesaw and Purple Mash towards the end of next week to keep you busy until Santa arrives!

Food tasting

To begin our exciting Design and Technology unit, the children have been trying different soups and bread rolls. Oxtail was surprising the biggest hit, although Mrs Joplin’s homemade pumpkin soup didn’t go down so well!!! The children are going to be investigating different flavours in order to make it extra yummy and making their own pumpkin soup and carrot soup to serve to parents as they attend the play next week. So please come ready and prepared to try one of our homemade bread rolls and delicious soups!

Reading

Unfortunately, our reading percentages dropped slightly from last week to 68% Let’s have one final push for next week and see if we can get a Christmas miracle of 100%!

We know each and every one of you can do it!

Our classroom is looking very Christmassy this week. We have our tree and nativity scene up and some very twinkly lights. We have lots of Christmas themed stories that the children can choose to read and we have been sharing some of them for story time too. The school post box for Christmas cards is out in the entrance, please remember to post any cards by 15th December. Next week we are performing the dress rehearsal of our KS1 production ‘It’s a Cracker!’ to the whole school. Reminders have been sent out that all children need to come to school wearing a Christmas jumper on Tuesday 12th December ready for this. The usual school shorts, trousers, leggings or skirts are fine with their Christmas jumper. They will also need to wear a Christmas jumper on the following day, Wednesday 13th December, as this is our Christmas lunch day, Christmas jumper day and Christmas activity day all rolled into one!

Class 2 have started their new English unit this week and it’s a festive one! The children will be practising their letter writing skills in order to write a polite and informative letter to Santa (without too many demands!) We have looked at the structure of a letter and the importance of having an introduction and conclusion alongside using questions with correct punctuation. We even have our own class 2 post box which we can use to send the finished letters on their way. We have also been looking at the use of effective questioning in our new computing unit. We will be continuing this over the next two weeks. Maths has been VERY tricky this week as we tackled the difficult concept of two-digit subtraction crossing a ten (for example 72 – 38). Everyone has worked their socks off to try and understand this work and we have had lots of practical apparatus in use for support.

Ladies in Pigs visit

On Thursday of this week, we were really lucky to have a visit from Ladies in Pigs. They are a fantastic organisation who work alongside primary schools to deliver workshops on farming, food hygiene and food preperation. The children thoroughly enjoyed making sausage rolls, whilst learning what is like to live and work on a farm. Not only did this tie in really well with our up-and-coming Design Technology unit on food, but it was also a great reminder of what the children had previously explored during their ‘history of farming’ unit.

There is no additional homework this week so the focus is on practising being clear and confident with your lines for the play, getting those three reading signatures and practising your spellings.

Spellings

This week the focus is on some of the common exception words that children are expected to know and be able to spell by the end of year 2. There are some different ideas for practising them at the bottom of the post. The spelling quiz has also been added to the 2do section on Purple Mash so you can complete this at home if you want to.

Reading

This week our reading score improved greatly. By working as a team and giving our friends lots of encouragement we managed to achieve a reading percentage of 93%!

Well done class 2. What a brilliant improvement. Please try and keep this up for next week!

This week has been a busy one! As well as finishing our literacy unit and copying up our final story settings, we have also been learning new methods for adding two 2 digit numbers in maths, drawing Brandesburton maps in Geography and practising for the play! As well as all of these things, they still managed to apply their computing skills in making dinosaur leaflets and then learning about world habitats and how animals are adapted to where they live! All of the children will need a good rest this weekend as they have all worked so hard!

Play rehearsals

Thank you so much parents for helping the children to learn their scripts at home. The play is really coming along and the children are all able to recall their lines, without their scripts!
We are beginning to put some actions to the songs and even getting some of the props together. We can’t wait to perform our show to you in a few week time!

Reading

We had another small improvement in our reading scores again this week with 81% of us reading three times or more at home! One class this week managed to get 100% of pupils reading this frequently. Let’s work our socks off next week to see if class 2 can be top of the leader board!

School Visitors!

We are very excited to welcome ‘Ladies in Pigs’ to Key Stage One next week. The ladies specialise in education and promotion of the British food and farming industry. This event will link our recently completed geography work to the food technology unit we will soon be starting. We can’t wait to see which tasty recipe they will be cooking with the children. They are a not for profit organisation and you can learn more about their work here https://www.ladiesinpigs.co.uk/how-lips-supports-the-pig-industry/

Spelling

The children have all taken home a copy of their spelling words this week. They are focusing on words ending with ‘tion’.

Everyone has made an excellent start on their descriptions of an imaginary setting this week, based on the Imagination scene from Charlie and the Chocolate factory. The children started by designing their own amazing Candyland settings and there was so much discussion about fluffy soft candy cotton clouds, scrumptious chocolate waterfalls and sticky lollipop trees! We can’t wait to see what they add to their descriptions.

In maths we have been working on adding and subtracting ten and will be moving onto 2-digit number additions and subtractions. There are still quite a lot of children who can’t recall their number bonds to ten and this has made some of their daily mental maths work quite tricky as they really need to be able to apply this knowledge to learning number bonds to 20 which is a year 2 objective. Please help your child to practise as much as possible. Some extra number bond activities have been added to Purple Mash to support with this and the Hit the Button activity on Topmarks is great for number bonds and other mental maths activities, https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button . We won’t be activating TT Rockstars until the Spring term to coincide with us starting our multiplication and division block in our maths lessons.

We are in full swing for Christmas play rehearsals and you are in for a treat! The stage will be going up on Friday and the children are excited about becoming proper actors and delivering their lines. Next week we are going to be encouraging the children to say their lines without a script so they can concentrate on their stage positioning and acting. We will of course prompt where necessary. With this in mind, reading and learning lines is once again the class homework for this week. Your support with this is very much appreciated.

Our spelling pattern for next week will be learning about contractions. This is when two words are joined to make one shorter word, like when ‘is not‘ becomes ‘isn’t‘. This will mean the children being introduced to another piece of punctuation – the apostrophe. Here is our spelling list of common contractions that we will focus most closely on.

Geography

This week in Geography, the children thoroughly enjoyed going on a walk of the village, looking for human and physical features of the environment. It was wonderful to see how many features they spotted and to hear Mr Mallison explain how the village has changed over time. Thank you so much to all of the volunteers who came to support Class 1 and Class 2. You were amazing road monitors!

Reading

This week our home-reading score was very similar to last week at 75%. Miss Northen has set the whole school a challenge for next week…the classes which all have 100% of pupils reading 3 times or more will get a super treat the following week! Can we possibly be one of those super classes?!?

Class 2 have moved on from creating their excellent Remembrance poetry last week to a new writing unit on familiar settings. As we are lucky enough to be so very near to the coast, the children are writing descriptive pieces about the seaside. They really enjoyed listening to the humorous story of The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch which engaged their interest and helped them to focus on what they might see, hear, smell, feel and taste at the seaside.

In computing the children have completed their e-leaflets explaining what the internet is and describing things such as browser, website and search engine to show their understanding. In science they played a fun game picking different cards describing an animal, plant or tree and then they had to match it to a coastal, woodland, pond or urban habitat. They were all excellent at this! They then had a copy of a map of East Yorkshire and marked the different habitat areas on it.

The big excitement this week is that Key Stage One have started their Christmas Play! Parts have been allocated, songs are being practiced and dances will soon be prepared. Thank-you in advance for your support with practising lines, it is really appreciated. A big thanks also to everyone who came to our Championing Reading morning on Wednesday. It was lovely to see everyone and to showcase just how much our pupils enjoy reading and how much progress they are making.

Homework:

Please practise your lines for the play and continue to read through the song words too. This week’s spelling pattern example word list is below for you to practise too. We will be looking at suffixes – groups of letters added to the end of a work to make a new word, for example enjoy+ment = enjoyment,

In P.E. this week, the children loved creating interesting shapes with their bodies to display their stretching and balancing skills. After learning how to carefully carry the mats around the room in a safe way, the children had to work in pairs to create balances with 1, 2, 3 or 4 body parts touching the floor. This is what some of them came up with!

Reading

Our home-reading score dipped slightly this week. 74% of class 2 read three time or more.

Please do your best to read three times every week, it really does help us in all areas of our learning!

Well our first week back has certainly been busy! We were very excited to have a visit from a children’s author, Elizabeth Green. She very kindly came to talk to children not only in our class but also in EYFS, class 1 and class 3. The children were very interested to hear that she wrote her first book when she was only fourteen although it wasn’t published until last year! Elizabeth also explained about how she used to use a typewriter to write her stories. This confused some of the children so we had a quick google to show them all a picture of what a typewriter is and they all thought it would be quite fun to use one. Elizabeth also talked about books she loved as a child and was very interested to hear about class 2’s favourite books. There was also time for a quick question and answer session and class 2 were as SUPERB as ever at asking questions!

We also started a short poetry block this week focusing on the significance of Remembrance Day. We have read some really emotive poetry with some quite tricky language in them but the children were so respectful of the underlying messages. Look out for some of the neat copies of the children’s own poems being posted on Seesaw. To compliment their poetry, the children have also painted poppies and mounted them on a background of a collage of war photos which have made them visually very effective.

It is also time for us to start rehearsals for the Key Stage One Christmas play and scripts and song words will be sent home very shortly. The songs are sounding fantastic already. Homework for this week, in addition to our spelling work, is to read through the song words (and any script words that you are given on Monday) and to make sure you understand them.

Spelling:

This week’s spelling pattern is the ‘er’ sound spelt /or/ after w and the ‘or’ sound spelt /ar/ after w. Please read through the words. You could also have a go at spelling them or putting them into sentences.

Reading

We are really please to see our home-reading score soar again this week! Thank you so much to the 94% of class 2, who read three times or more over the last week! Please keep it up for next week! We could even aim for the stars…let’s go for 100%!

First Special Mention Assembly with parents

It was great to see a few familiar faces attend our Special Mention Assembly which took place on Friday. If your child brings home a Special Mention certificate/invite on a Thursday evening, we would love to see you attend the Friday assembly. It starts at 2.45!

Remembrance day

Thank you to all of the parents and carers who were able to attend the Remembrance Service this week. The children sang really beautifully and the speakers performed brilliantly. It was a great opportunity for us all to remember our heroes!

What a half term we have had in Class 2! The children have all settled really well and are beginning to make excellent progress!

Art week!

We have thoroughly enjoyed getting stuck into our drawing and painting unit this week! We began by taking inspiration from the world around us and created some landscape drawings. We then practised a number of different drawing techniques, including using tone and different media, before completing a final landscape drawing.

In the second half of the unit, we experimented with water colour paint. We recapped our knowledge of making secondary colours before exploring colouring mixing, to create tone and texture!

Have a look at some of the final paintings we created!

Homework

This week for homework, we would love to see the children practising the skills that they have learned this week in our art lessons. Therefore, we would love to see their best landscape drawings or paintings. This could be a drawing or painting from real life or a copy of one found in a magazine or on the internet! Remember to try to include tone, blending, lines of different thicknesses and texture! Please post your progress pictures, or final pieces, for us to see on Seesaw!

Reading scores

This week, as a class, 75% of us read three times or more! This might have been higher but a few of us forgot to return our reading journals! Please try to bring them into school every day so we can get those great scores in the future!

Safety

This half term there is lots of fun to be had with Halloween and Bonfire Night. Please make sure you all keep yourselves safe! Be Bright, Be Seen!!!!

Hope you all have lots of fun and we can’t wait to see you back, after the break!

Mrs Platten and Mrs Joplin x