Year 2 has hit the ground running with an impressive start to term 3. There is a great sense of pride and teamwork in every achievement and it’s been delightful watching the growth and blossoming of new learning, friendships and confidence over the past few weeks. 

Religious Education
Meditation continues to be an important part of our day and a time where we connect with God in the stillness of prayer. In Religion lessons, we have been deepening our knowledge of Mary and finding out why we should honour her. We completed a story map and compared the qualities of Mary to an important person in our own lives. We have also been singing songs and praying the ‘Hail Mary’ to connect our minds and hearts to this extraordinary woman who is loved by so many. 

Maths
In CMC classes the children are working to achieve mastery while completing number families, addition and subtraction problems and algebra equations.

In our Ochre units we have been completing a Daily Review and extending our knowledge of time, times tables, number patterns and 2D shapes. We are also learning to draw 3 dimensional shapes and identify their properties. 

English
The children are enjoying their Mastery classes where the focus is on improving reading and spelling skills. 

In our English Ochre Units we have been trying to extend our sentences using the ‘5 W’s and How’ (who, where, when, what, why, how.) This is helping to improve our vocabulary and makes a sentence more interesting for the reader. 

We have also looked at prepositions which are important because they often begin a phrase and add details to a sentence such as location, time or position. We made a beetle biscuit and used words such as over under, beside, between, to arrange our delicious creations. YUM! Such a fun way to learn!

Our Friday reading groups are continuing this term and the children love having our parents and grandparents supporting us in our reading journey!

Visual Arts
In Art we have been creating our mixed media jellyfish paintings over the last few weeks. We have used different mediums— tempera paints, chalk pastels and oil pastels to create our pictures. Children created an underwater background painting using liquid tempera paint layering on white right on top of the blue and blended to create a tint of blue. Then painted just blue, then just purple and then black working their way down their papers. Students were encouraged to blend where two different colours met, to create a smooth transition.

Children then drew jellyfish using white chalk pastels and shaded them in.

We discussed the difference between opaque and translucent when creating the jellyfish with chalk pastels. Students then added black and green seaweed and some fish with oil pastels. We love how the jellyfish look - they’re almost glowing!

During PE lessons, the children play tag games such as ‘octopus tag’ and ‘capture the flag’. They learn team skills and cooperation as well as being a good sport and having fun together!

In Science our topic this term is Earth and Space. So far, the children have learnt about the earth, what it is made of, and described what water is used for as a resource. Last week we got our hands dirty in the gardens as we identified different types of soil around our school and how it is formed. 

Performing Arts
We are so lucky to have Miss Erika lead us in our Mary Poppins Dance for the Musical. We have some tricky moves to learn and are having fun on stage rehearsing our steps and keeping in time with the music.

Mrs Frances Devonald
Teacher 2 Blue