2SM

"We are stars - watch us shine with the gifts that God gave us!"

Welcome to Class 2SM

Dear Year 2 children and parents,

My name is Miss McTiernan, I have been a teacher here at St. Edward’s since I started my teaching career; over 13years ago. I have taught in many year groups including Reception, Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3 and I have thoroughly enjoyed them all for different reasons. I am currently teaching in Year 2, specifically 2SM, and I lead R.E. This was a subject that I chose to study at University whilst training to be a teacher.  I am also the lead teacher for Behaviour across the school.

I did Irish dancing when I was younger, so have always liked to keep active, I still run and do other things and always enjoy seeing the children from St. Edward’s out and about on my travels. They always look quite shocked to see me somewhere other than school! The children in my class will often hear me talking about my family and I particularly like to share stories about my nieces and nephews.

If I had to describe myself in 3 words I would say I was happy, energetic and enthusiastic.

I am really looking forward to the year ahead, getting to know you and your child. If you need anything, I am always here to listen and help where I can. There are many adults who may be working with your child at some point but incase any of you are unsure of what I look like see if you can find me on the 'Who's who' page in the information tab.

We have many ways to communicate here at school, but currently the most efficient way would be to email the teacher@stedward.bham.sch.uk email address which will be checked regularly and will try to respond to you as quickly as I can.

As the children are now Year 2 we are encouraging them to try and be a bit more independent and to think about what they can do for themselves to prepare for the school day. To help get the children into routine to start with please could you help us by checking that your child always has the correct school uniform, a drinks bottle as currently we cannot have spare cups in the classroom and their reading bag with their reading book in everyday. Your child has been issued with a BGFL login incase any home learning needs to take place, could you please access it and send us a quick email to us so that we know the children's details work. If you have any issues with devices or computing equipment could you please let us know and we can arrange alternative provision.

Our current PE day is on a Tuesday, and the children can come into school in PE kit for the day, we will notify you if this changes as we do have external providers associated with school to enhance our provision; and they are only available on certain days. Please remember no earrings should be worn for health and safety reasons and a white round neck t-shirt and plain blue or black shorts/ tracksuit bottoms should be worn.

The children have settled in extremely well on on their transition days. From the first day they have come in with big smiles and full of stories and things to tell me, it really does make me smile! Initially, we will be establishing routines and reminding the children of the rules which will help us to learn and keep everyone safe all at the same time, they are so eager to please and have already earned lots of track it light points! 

The first two books we will be studying are 'The Day the Crayons Quit' and 'The Day the Crayons Came Home' which the children will really enjoy and have already been introduced to. I love stories and at times get carried away when reading them, but the children's enthusiasm fuels this even more. I am really looking forward to seeing the journey we go on this year and the wonderful things we can share together.

Take care everybody,

Miss McTiernan

Curriculum Overview

Please find details of what we will be covering over the Autumn Term in this document.

Over the last week, the children in Year 2 have been following all of the steps to set up their own business. They worked in groups to think of business names, design a logo, find out where ingredients come from and have designed their own product. Their aim was to set up a pizza business. They were able to make their bases and add their toppings and then when they were cooked we tasted and evaluated the product. It was great fun!

School Closure: 10.3.23

Please find below a selection of activities to complete whilst at home. There is no need to complete all of the activities, please select what is appropriate.

You will find some spelling work on the Year 2 common exception words, where children have to correct the spelling mistakes. We have introduced how to use a dictionary this week, so if you have a dictionary at home the children could use it to help.

There is a selection of Maths revision activities for adding and subtracting to and from a ten. As always using the Top Marks 'Hit the Button' game is great practice to help embed basic number facts.

There is a reading activity, where there is a choice of 3 versions. You can read it to your child and answer the questions together or your child can read it and attempt the questions independently.

We have been learning about the Great Fire of London so we have also attached a short information pack about firefighting in the past and firefighting now and the children can sort the pictures to match the appropriate period. As an extra challenge the children could write some facts to match the pictures from what they have learned from the information pack.

You could also log in to Quizziz for our big Year 2 quiz which revises all of our learning from the last half term.

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button

https://quizizz.com/admin/quiz/63cc58e28e7233001dc46f0a?source=quiz_share

Please copy the links into your browser to access

If you are unable to print them, children could just answer questions on a piece of paper from the screen.

Spring 2 Week 1 and 2;

We are learning about the Great Fire of London and we have started to look at how can find out more information about this event from different sources. We were detectives and had to find clues in pictures and decide which was best source to support a piece of information. We have also explored colour mixing ready to create artwork about the Great Fire. It was also World Book day and it was exciting to come as either our favourite character or an interesting word. We started to look at a new book called “Mother Earth is Weeping” and it has really helped us to refocus on God’s creation and how at times we don’t look after it. We have also been on a trip to Dudley Zoo to look at animals in captivity and how the zoo recreates the animals habitats.

We have also started our Lenten fundraising activities. We have been adding up our miles to support CAFOD in our Big Lent Walk and have managed about 10 miles so far, please sponsor us. We have also been selling tiptops which are very popular.

Aswell as that, it snowed! We had great fun playing out in it.

This week we had a visit from Sr Eleanor from CAFOD who came to speak to us about Catholic Social Teachign and how we can help those less fortunate during Lent. She was very inspirational and it really helped us to think of others. We also took part in the tennis roadshow where we learned some tennis skills and even got free tickets to  tennis centre.

Aswell as all of this we have had Safer Internet day, Pyjama day and Parents evening! We have earned a rest.

Spring 1 Week 4:

This week we have been making cards for World Day if the Sick to deliver to local places around school to help cheer people up. This led us into learning about the Sacrament of the Sick and how the oil is absorbed by our bodies to give people strength during hard times when they are sick. We re enacted what the priest would do during the sacrament. We have been doing lots of our lessons outside and have been focusing on our ten times tables using our orienteering markers and school map and also building words in phonics to help us with spelling. In PE we have been focusing on dance and different movements to music in the style of different characters.

Spring 2 Week 3:

After enjoying our class text so much we have started to find out and research information about owls. We have used the IPads to find out information about them, some of the facts are so interesting whilst some are just funny! We had another fun filled recycling workshop where we made fish out of recycled materials, we were so excited to take them home and show them off. We have been exploring op8nions about both Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole and deciding whether we agree with the opinions or not based on what we have learned. We have had to explain to our group our reasons and then we had some cryptic facts and we had to decide were they about Mary or Florence. We had yet another outdoor day where we were looking at micro habitats and where we could find different creatures, some were very unusual. We also tried to use natural materials to build suitable habitats. We have been looking at some of the miracles of Jesus and how people reacted when he performed them. We also compared Jesus to teachers we have had, 

lots of the words we used about our teachers we would, also use to describe Jesus.

Spring 1 Week 2:

We had a special visitor from St Mary’s Hospice to thank us for all of the fundraising and support we give them. It was very exciting and there were lots of high fives! We have started to look at our new Book ‘The Owl who’s afraid of the Dark’ so we have been predicting why he is afraid and what might happen in the book and designing our own front covers for a new version of the book.

Welcome back and Happy New Year!
It has been great to welcome the children back this week and start the Spring term with a bang, as ever the children are constantly smiling and enthusiastic about everything they do. We celebrated our first whole school mass of the term for the feats of the Epiphany where the three kings arrived in Bethlehem to worship the new born king.

Autumn 2 Week 5;

We had our first computing day this week! We got to use the IPads all day! We explored creating pictures that could move we then took the further to create full animations. As we are preparing for Christmas, we created Nativity animations and added the characters in the order that they visited by Jesus. We invited more parents in to story time and to look at our books and all of the wonderful work we have completed so far this year. We watched the CAFOD Advent assembly and made Advent pledges in response to what we heard. We hung them outside our class for everyone to see. To support St Mary’s Hospice the whole school undertook a Rudolph Run, we all ran as much as we could around the playgrounds, wearing our Rudolph antlers (obviously) to raise money for this wonderful place that cares for people who are unwell.

we used our art lessons to explore tint and shade using primary colours, we then used this knowledge in our Advent craft activities to create Advent wreaths with different tints and shades we created, it was great fun! We then learned about the significance of the Advent wreath and described why it has five candle and why they are those colours, it is a circle as God’s love never ends like  circle and it is made from evergreen as it never dies.

Autumn 2 Week 4:

We had our first year group mass today and it was wonderful, so many parents came to support and celebrate with us. We read and sang beautifully. We also joined the rest of the school to watch the first match of the World Cup and support the England team.

Autumn 2 Week 3:

Another busy week in 2SM! We had our wonderful retreat day with Dan and Emily called “Let creation sing” we were focusing on Brother Sun. We sang songs, said and wrote prayers and though about all the things we are able to do because of Brother Sun. We enjoyed our collective whole sessions where we could learn about the other aspects of creation and what our school community had been learning about. To follow this, it was great to go out into God’s creation for our Outdoor Day! We explored God’s creation and then consolidated our history learning by making hospitals like Florence Nightingale and remedies like Mary Seacole made for the soldiers in her care. It was also Anti bullying week where talked about reaching out. We decided not only can we reach out if we are sad and worried but we can reach out to help others too. We have been completing our Travel Tracker to try and get more active and save the planet with our travel to school but also because it is Road Safety week and our class reader had a character who was having an issue with crossing the road. He is a nocturnal prickly creature, can you guess what he is? Yes, it’s a hedgehog and his family are dying as they don’t know how to cross the road safely.

we got our invitations ready for our families to one and join us to celebrate mass and we were leading it, we also experienced the different ways in which we can pray, we meditated, prayed our loud and prayed in colour.

Autumn 2 Week 2:
This week we started to think about those who have gone to heaven and those who gave their lives during the wars. We made poppies to put around our classroom door and windows and wrote prayers to remember those who gave their lives and those who we love. We also started to prepare for our whole school retreat day by creating some art work to celebrate God’s creation. We discussed all of the wonderful things God has given us and how we need to take care to look after it. All of our art work will be put together with work from the rest of the school in a new display. In Science, we have been testing what we can do with different objects and materials; can we stretch them? Can we bend them? Do they change shape when we do this?

Autumn 2 Week 1:

We have had a very busy first week back in 2SM.

We started out making predictions about our new book 'Katie in London' we were being detectives and looking for clues on the front over. When we listened to the story we were surprised by the adventure the characters went on. There were a lot of events in the story to remember so we worked with a partner to sequence the pictures and retell the story. We then wrote the story in our own words remembering our capital letter, full stops and thinking about our spelling.

In Math's we have been using the number facts for numbers within ten that we already know to work out trickier calculations, focusing on subtraction. Lots of practice of basic number facts at home would really help us.

We finished our Geography topic by writing some directions to decide if they were important and leanring about what physical and human features are. We then started our History topic about a significant person from the past called Florence Nightingale. So far, we know her name and that she was a nurse. We are looking forward to finding out more interesting facts about her.

We have our Villa Coach working with us this half term on the skills we will need to play invasion games.

If that wasn't enough for one week, we also had some visitors. First, we had Carys who came to teach us some Bollywood dancing to celebrate Diwali and we also had the Animal Man, who brought lots of little visitors with him that we could touch and stroke.

We have also continued to develop our song 'Once a man fell in a well'. We have now learned to play a tuned instrument using music notation to play a melody along with the words.

We told you we have been busy!

Week 6 and 7:

We are coming to the end of a very busy half term in Year 2. 
We have started to study our new book ‘Coming to England’ and the author of this book Floella Benjamin is actually a character in the story. The story tells us about people treated her when she first came to this country and how she worked hard and eventually achieved her dream of meeting the Queen! We have pretended to be different character so we can try to imagine what they must have been thinking at different points in the story. We have also retold the story in lots of detail and pretended to be Floella in a diary on the day she met the Queen.We have been really trying hard with our capital letters and full stops and making sure our writing makes sense.

In maths we have been focusing on finding ten more and ten less than a given 2 digit number and all of the ways this could be represented. We have now moved onto using number facts like 3+ 4 to work out trickier calculation with 2 digit numbers.

We did an investigation in Science after Noah asked us t9 help him as God asked him to build another ark. Thousands of years later there are so many more materials to chose from so we wanted to make sure when we wrote him a letter we were giving him correct information.

We went to the postbox and posted the postcards we had written in Geography. We will see if we have set our address accurately and if it gets delivered. We have also been looking at features in our environment and how we can represent these on maps using a key.

We had an exciting recycling workshop where we were able to use recycled materials to make something new! We were fascinated by what you could do.

We were joined by the Legion of Mary on Teams in the classroom to pray the Rosary as it is the month of October, we were very reverent and lots of us have our own Rosary beads at home that we want to use to pray.

It has also been Maths week at school and after Miss Costello’s assembly we could see how often we use maths. Each and everyday and how we are all mathematicians. We also looked at a famous mathematician called Renee Descartes and how he used coordinates to help him find things on a map. Mr Evans needed help with making a map for the playground as objects keep going missing or are moving and he can’t remember where they go. We used shapes to represent the objects and used our knowledge of maps to make sure they were really clear.

We have continued to sing our song “Once a man fell in a well” and as well as using untuned instruments and keeping the pulse we have learned about dynamics and timbre and have explored this in different ways. We should be on stage!

Week 5:

This week we have been introduced to Black History Month so we have focused on the poet Benjamin Zephaniah and how he writes poems about the world being fair. It was National Poetry Day on Thursday, so we used this day to write our own poems about what we would have in our dreams but how our biggest dream is about the world working as a team. We have explored adjectives this week after identifying nouns in sentences.

In Maths, we have been writing equations to represent our counting in tens and we have all done extremely well.

We have been using our learning from outdoor day in Science and Geography in our lessons this week. We have had to use a map to find a route for new pupils starting at our school. We have sorted different objects into the materials they are made from and have tried to identify if an object can be made from more than one material.

We have been learning about the pulse and rhythm in music and playing untuned instruments to the pulse of a song we have been learning called ‘Once a man fell in a well.”

Week 4:

Where is the time going?! This week we have been working hard with our writing as a special surprise for our parents, they will need to keep an eye on the post. We have been expressing our opinions about the books we have been reading by writing a book review to help people decide if they want to read the books we like.

In Maths, we have been trying to use a variety of representations when answering questions, we have also started trying to use them in our journaling to prove our answers.

In RE we have learned about how God has tested some of the people in the Old Testament. We were quite shocked by some of the things they were asked to do, but because they were so faithful they were prepared to do it for God.

We had our Outdoor day this week too! We were able to do Maths,Geography, Science, Orienterring and RE, it was a very busy day! We are now experts in using maps and seeing why they are useful.

We always look forward to our Gameshow Quiz on a Friday where we have to try and remember things we have learned that week, but also things we have learned this year.

Week 3:

We have had yet another busy week in 2SM this week! We have continued with our ‘wake up shake up’ and daily mile every morning to work our bodies and prepare our brains for the days learning. In English, we have started to look at our new book ‘The Day the Crayons came home’ and what they get up to, make sure you ask us all about it.

In Maths, we have continued to look at the place value of each digit in a 2 digit number and how we can represent this in different ways. Counting in 2’s, 5’s and 10’s has also been something we have focused on to help.

In Science, we have been looking at the vocabulary we will be using in our lesson about materials so that we can talk like scientists. We have also looked at some unusual objects to see if people could use them. Would you use a chocolate teapot? What about a glass hammer or a paper shoe?

We have produced our final piece of art work based on Picasso’s style, although we actually think ours are better. He said that every child was an artist and we have to agree.

We have been working on our ball skills in P.E and practicing the moves that our visiting athlete will be asking us to complete and as well as that we took part in a whole school wake up shake up to celebrate National Fitness day, thank you Miss Avery for organising it!
If you look at the Year 2 Catholic Life page you will see all of the interesting things we have been learning in R.E too!

Finally, thank you to all of the parents who took the time to come to meet our teacher and find out about what will be expected of us over the coming year. Keep an eye out for more dates where you can find out what we will be learning this year.

Weeks 1 & 2; The weeks that were…

The children have made a great start back at school after a lovely summer holiday! This week we have started learning about the artist Picasso and his style of art, focusing particularly on portraits. We looked at his art work and decided if we liked it or not and gave reasons why.

We had a very exciting visit from Duncan from our book, who was able to answer some of the questions we wanted to ask him. We had to remember our capital letter, our question word and also the question mark. We have also used the book to focus our PSHE work on and learning about what a compliment is, Duncan didn’t receive many compliments from the crayons! 
We have been sequencing number patterns to 50 and looking at numbers that come in between two given numbers. In Maths, we have also started using equipment to create different two digit numbers, looking at how many groups of ten and ones we need to represent a number. 

The children have shown great enthusiasm towards PE and our gymnastics skills and ball skills.

Please look at the Catholic life tab to see how reverent and respectful we have been in class this week and the interesting things we have learned.

 In Geography, we looked at addresses and postcodes and how they are used to send letters/postcards to different locations around the world. 

We remembered Queen Elizabeth II, by thinking about some of the key events in her life and writing notes to her to say thank you for all she did for us and our country.

Over the coming weeks, we will be focusing on our school rules and routines to ensure that we are making the most of our time in school and enjoying the fun work we will be doing.

The year that was 2021-22!

We have had a very exciting couple of weeks in Year 2. We have enjoyed having Aston Villa helping us with our PE and our team work skills as well as ball skills. He encourages us to think about many values in our sessions like fairness and respect.

We had Art week and the artist we learned about was Matisse. We looked at some of his painting and discussed whether we liked them or not and why. We have learned many facts about his life and how he started painting but them changed his style and began to use collage. We recreated his famous piece on ‘The Snail’ and then we created our own work based on The Queen using his style.

We have started our new text ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’ and have been making predictions about what we think is going to happen. We all agreed we wouldn’t want a grandma like George’s. In the forest we also made our own medicines inspired by George. We have also had National Refugee Week, we have learned that everyone has a right to a name and a nationality and we have celebrated our own names by making posters. We have looked at the books ‘My name is not Refugee’ and ‘The Journey’. We had to think about what we would take and had to think carefully as we can only take what we need to survive and what we can carry, it was very tricky.

We have also had great fun taking part in Science Week where we followed instructions to make our own play dough, we then used the play dough to make a model of a Gorilla as we have also been learning about the famous Scientist Jane Goodall and her work with primates.

Then, we did an investigation for Mrs Kenneth to help her choose the best biscuits for her meetings so people can dunk them in their tea without them breaking.

In RE we have started looking at the miracles of Jesus and the children impressed us with their prior knowledge and everything they had remembered from Year 1.

As you can see it has been a very busy time in Year 2, and the children are really rising to the challenge.

Week 4 and 5

We have been very excited to start our new text ‘The owl who’s afraid of the dark’ by Jill Tomlinson. We read the first chapter and couldn’t believe how frightened Plop the little barn owl was. We have offered him some advice about fireworks in our English lessons and designed new front covers for the book like we are the author. We have been looking at division and fractions and enjoyed drawing on the tables to help us. We have been looking at the signs and symbols of Easter and what they respresent and even made our own Pascal candles. We have started planting some seeds in Science after the teachers couldn’t agree what seeds needed to germinate. We have continued learning about The Gambia and comparing where we live to there.

we also had a very exciting trip to the Botanical Gardens as part of our Science topic. We got to see some unusual plants and had to hunt for interesting facts about them. Ruth one of the teachers at the venue taught us all about the parts of plants and we even got to do some acting.

We have also been doing our SATs. We have been working so hard and have been so sensible and mature.

It was a short week this week with a bank holiday and polling day, but that didn't stop us having a non stop week. It was lovely to welcome parents into the classroom to do a short activity with the children and to have a look at the wonderful work the children have been doing. We also had a whole school focus on vocations as this Sunday was Vocations Sunday. The children explored ways that they could shine their light and be a disciple of Jesus to live out their vocation. It was also takeover day, where the children applied to be different staff within school. If they were successful they got to take on the role of that person for a period of the school day. We had cooks, teachers, office staff and many more.

The children have returned to school extremely settled and ready for the busy term ahead. The children have enjoyed discussing our new Gospel Virtues, grateful and generous and exploring what these mean to them and thinking of examples. Due to deteriorating weather conditions at the end of term, the children completed their sponsored event this week raising money for our chosen charities. The children had to keep moving as a whole school for an entire hour! We were extremely proud of their determination. The children have enjoyed listening to the different bible accounts of the resurrection and have been detectives, spotting the similarities and differences. The children have used their experience of our zoo trip this week as we have explored the book 'Zoo' another great book by Anthony Browne. I was astonished by all they could remember about the author, but also about common themes in his books. We had an interesting conversation about our thoughts on zoos and have used this conversation to write letters about whether zoos should remain open or closed.

What a Holy Week (6)!

Year 2 had a busy week this week as we prepared for the Easter Holidays, including Holy Week. We learnt about the significant events that happened in Jesus' life and how we can think about these days during the Easter Holidays. We celebrated our Easter Bonnet parade this week, with many of our children creating wonderful bonnets that the Key Stage 2 children applauded and praised! We also innovated our own stories of gorilla, which created lots of fantastic variations of a book we have loved reading!

For-give us some time to tell you about Week 5!

This week we looked at the meaning of Lent and how we ask God for forgiveness during this time. We thought about times we have offended others and we prayed to God, asking him for forgiveness. In our English lessons, we carried out some research on gorilla's and we created detailed reports to send to Dudley Zoo. We continued to develop our Map skills this week by finding The Gambia (and we saw how it looks a bit like a worm-shape on the West Coast of Africa!). Developing our Tennis skills was how we spent our PE lesson this week, looking at controlling the ball on our racket and beginning to strike the ball with a forehand technique.

Afri-Can you see what we did in Week 4?!

Year 2 have enjoyed coming into school this week basking in the beginning of the Spring sunshine! On Tuesday, we had our outdoor day and children were desperate to create structures linked to The Gambia, ranging from huts, market stalls and even full compounds, which helped us to learn a lot about how Gambian people live compared to us (and the weather even had us feeling like we were in The Gambia!). For our Lenten fundraising, we have also had Fancy Dress Day, where we chose a sport theme and had lots of different costumes come in!

Here’s a pizza-bout week 3:

This week, Mr. Worthington and Mrs Bailey had set the children a STEM project. We started by learning about business names and logos and the children worked in groups to design their own logo for a Pizzeria. We then looked at where different foods come from and this led us into making simple food chains. We looked at healthy eating and how we could incorporate some of the food groups into our pizza. At the end of the week, we ended with chopping our ingredients and cooking our own pizzas, which we tasted and evaluated. We have made great strides in our fundraising efforts and have sold out of tip tops twice. The children showed great reverence and respect when the Legion of Mary came to pray the Rosary with us.

We are zoo-ming into week 2:

This week was a very exciting week where we went to Dudley Zoo. The children were amazing ambassadors for our school. We were focussing on habitats and what animals needed to survive in their habitat and with our topic about Africa developing we were seeing how many animals from different continents we could spot. We have been really focusing on forgiveness in this season of Lent and getting our minds and hearts ready for Jesus. Using our knowledge of habitats we innovated our own story based on the book ‘Leaf’ which Miss Broadbent had asked us to focus on for World Book Day. We have entered a competition where we have designed our own badges for Wow Living Streets and the travel tracker we fill in each day to see who is travelling to school in a sustainable way and caring for the environment. Let’s see if one of us wins!

Week 1... We have it covered!

We welcomed the children back after what we hope was a very restful half term break. We were preparing ourselves for the start of Lent and we received the ashes on our forehead as a symbol of this season. The children were very excited in the build up to world book day and we completed a whole array of activities. We started  a new book called ‘Leaf’ which linked well with our Science work, we had quizzes, we made book marks, we had lots of discussion all about different books that we like and why.

The Big Spring One!
During this half term, Year 2 have enjoyed two different topics and we have learnt lots through them!
The first topic we studied was the Great Fire of London, a significant event in British history. We learnt about Samuel Pepys and his diary, as well as learning how the fire started, how it was stopped and what changes were made to stop something like that happening again.
In PE, we have been practicing our ball skills and applying these skills in our cricket lessons. 
We have learnt about Castles in our history lessons, looking at William the Conqueror and how he became king of England. We looked at all the castles he built in England and we even had the opportunity to visit one when we went to Warwick Castle! We were able to spot the different features of a castle too.
 

Autumn 2 Week 5 - An update on our Adventures this week!

This week marked the start of Advent, a time where we think, pray and prepare ourselves for the birth of Jesus in four weeks time on Christmas day. To mark this, we spent Monday doing some silent, meditation style prayer, drawing pictures to represent what or who we were praying for. We also had the opportunity to get creative with our Advent craft, creating Advent wreaths. We have looked at directions this week in Geography, looking at compasses and the different points that a compass has. In our writing this week, we have written for different purposes creating a letter to Grandma from Katie in London, informing her of our findings from our Science experiment last week, letting her know what the best resources are to make a blanket. We also created wanted posters as we had received a letter from the Queen asking us to try and find the lion who had kidnapped the children and caused chaos around London! In Music this week, we have been creating our own melodies after mastering the melody to 'Once a man fell in a well' with some children even trying to play Silent Night, which was a very challenging piece of music to play. This is preparing us well for our Nativity on the 14th and 15th as Silent Night is the carol that we will be singing! 

Autumn 2 Week 4- More 'Material' for the class page!

It has been an exciting week in Year 2 as it always is, with lots of different activities going on throughout the week. We have began reading a new book this week called 'Katie in London' to link to our work on the Great Fire of London, which we will be starting soon! We linked this to our work in Geography, where we have looked at the United Kingdom! We used Atlases to locate the countries of the United Kingdom and their Capital cities also! In Maths this week, we have been introduced to doubling and halving numbers as well as consolidating our work on odd and even numbers. We had an exciting opportunity in Science to become materials engineers and test different materials for how waterproof they were in order to make a new coat for Katie's grandma in our class text! We chose our own methods of testing and worked together in groups to work out which material was the most waterproof. We also investigated how we can change the shape of different materials and we had and we even took part in challenges to make certain objects out of certain materials! In Music this week we played 'Once a man fell in a well' on Glockenspiels which the children enjoyed and some even managed to play and sing at the same time! We spent some time in the hall this week doing some yoga too!

Autumn 2 Week 3 - Find OUT what we’ve been up to!
This week, we embarked on our first outdoor day! We spent all day exploring, building and working as a team in the forest. We built and created our own hospitals to celebrate the work of Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale and recap the work that we have done in class. We had to build our hospitals to make sure they could stand on their own, it had a roof and that it could fit a patient inside. Our children even managed to build structures that they (and even Miss McTiernan) could sit on top of. This week also had two different themes to celebrate: Road Safety Week and Anti-Bullying Week. For road safety week, we have been looking at ‘Hodgeheg’, which is a story about Max the hedgehog who has troubles with crossing the road, giving him a bump on the head and getting his words in a muddle (or his mords in a wuddle!). We created

some Road Safety posters to advise Max how to cross the road, giving him tips to avoid getting another head on the bump! We spoke throughout the week about anti-bullying and how we can be kind to people and how we can look out for bullying inside and outside school. We created jigsaw pieces with actions we can carry out to spread kindness and keep bullying out of our school. 

Autumn 2 Week 2- Well… that was a busy one!

Our children this week had many different events to take part in which they did fantastically well. On Tuesday, we welcomed our parents into school to take part in our first open afternoon. It was fantastic to see so many of our parents and the excitement they shared with their child completing our online quiz that we use regularly to revisit the children’s learning. On Wednesday, we held our first year group Mass. Mrs Kennett was very impressed with how the children behaved, sung and read during the Mass, really setting an example for the rest of the infants. We took our History learning outside this week, taking part in a treasure hunt looking for information about Florence Nightingale’s life. Thursday was Remembrance Day and we took this opportunity to think of those who sacrificed themselves for us. An orchestra known as the Stringcredibles came to tell us more about the war through music, getting us involved with singing and marching too! We also created our own poppies to remember those who lost their lives in the war.

Autumn 2 Week 1- Back to Business!

This week we welcomed our children back into school after our half term break. We all are expected to be wearing our winter uniform now, with shirt and tie and trousers or skirt/pinafore. Please remember no jewellery or accessories (ear rings should just be a gold stud). 

We welcomed a visitor into Year 2 this week called Laura. She is also known as the Animal Woman! She brought different animals for us to see, hold and touch, teaching us a lot about how they live, where they come from and how they help our environment. This week we have also started our email questions to our children and it has been wonderful hearing some of their responses about the Animal woman. It is important that it is our children logging on and replying to the email, as this is developing their computer literacy. This week was also 'Coding Week' and we spent a lot of time using JIT5 on BGFL, programming different sprites to perform a range of different algorithms. This week helped us to develop our problem solving skills as well as our spatial awareness. In PE this week we have welcomed James from Aston Villa, who has started to improve our movement and decision making skills in different game situations. In History, we have been introduced to another significant figure from the past in Florence Nightingale. We discussed the word 'century' and identified which century she was from. We spoke about schools in the Victorian times so that the children could see the difference between schools then and now. We used Florence's determination to inspire us to think about what we want to be when we grow up and what steps we need to take to get there. 

Our penultimate week of Autumn 1… Week 6!

This week we looked at developing our independence in our Computing lesson by logging ourselves on and beginning to look at some coding activities! For the first time, we used the iPads to complete an online quiz on everything we have learnt so far this year, which we found very exciting! In PE, we continued to develop our gymnastic skills by learning more rolls and with our ball skills we practiced throwing through a target and catching! We took our Science lesson outside this week, by looking at different objects in our school environment, looking at the material they were made from and choosing properties to describe it.

Week 5: 

This week we have delved deeper into the life of Mary Seacole, we took on the role of a soldier injured in the war and had to inform our parent’s how we are and what it is like. We also looked at the poet Benjamin Zephaniah and some of his poetry. His poem ‘Once upon a time..’ was our focus and we were able to get creative with all the things we could do and have in our dreams.

In RE, we looked at story of Jonah and the Whale and the children were able to see straight away the links with the other scripture stories and how we should always obey God. Most of the children gave the story 5 stars.

In maths, we have continued focusing on tens and comparing multiples of ten and consolidating finding ten more and ten less.

We have been reading words and phrases containing alternative pronunciations for our vowel sounds. We have been enjoying our new reading books and reading with our peers and showing our understanding. We are trying to expression and intonation into all that we do.

We have been focusing on caring in our PSHE lessons and how we could show care for others in different scenarios.

We were very excited by our African dance workshop, it left us quite out of breath!

Week Four: What now?
The children have had their reading books this week, and have been showing great responsibility by bringing them in daily. Please ensure that the children bring their reading books everyday. They have shown great enthusiasm towards their homework with some bringing it straight back in the day after. 
This week we have begun looking at ‘Black History’ and focusing on Mary Seacole, lots of children have said how much they are enjoying it already! We have been reading lots about her and trying to find out as much as we can.

In maths, we have started to look at the word ‘multiple’ and counting in multiples of ten ready to start adding multiples of ten. We will be looking at number formation and making sure we are all getting our numbers the correct way round. Talking in maths is really important to share our thoughts and ideas and will help our peers find the most efficient way to solve problems.

We had our first library session this week. We sat and spoke about how a library works and how the books are organised, we will be working on scanning our own books in and out. We will be encouraging the children to make informed choices about the books they choose. Please ensure all library books are returned every Friday.

We have been enjoying learning about the stories from the ‘Old Testament’ we have studied Abraham and Isaac and couldn’t believe what God had asked Abraham to do, but once we discussed it we could see the reason. We role played David and Goliath and enjoyed taking on the different roles.

Week 3: what have we been up to now?

This week we have been very busy, in English we have been looking at word classes and sorting words into adjectives and nouns ready to start writing expanded noun phrases. We have been looking at tens and ones in Maths and the different representations we can use.

we have been focusing on caring and what this is and looks like, we did some role play where the children were able to show how they would respond to different scenarios. We have started exploring the stories of the Old Testament starting with Noah’s Ark, we also prayed a decade of the rosary to celebrate the work of the Legion of Mary.

We also took part in a whole school ‘wake up shake up’ to celebrate National Fitness day!

Week 2; The week that was…

This week in Year 2, we read ‘The Day the Crayons Came Home’, meeting new crayons and reading interesting postcards they had written for Duncan. In Geography, we looked at addresses and postcodes and how they are used to send letters/postcards to different locations around the world. We all wrote our own postcards about our time in Year 2 so far, reflecting on what we have enjoyed and what we have learnt. 
In Maths, we have started using equipment to create different two digit numbers, looking at how many groups of ten and ones we need to represent a number. 
We completed some practical work in Science this week, investigating the difference between a material and an object. We sorted different materials and objects into two categories.

In PE, we continued our fantastic work in the all developing our gymnastic skills and developing our ball skills by passing a ball using our feet, even hitting a target!

Week 1; The week that was…

The children have made a great start back at school after a lovely summer holiday! This week we have started learning about the artist Picasso and his style of art, focussing particularly on portraits. We looked at his art work and decided if we liked it or not and gave reasons why.

We had a very exciting visitor from our class text and Mr Red Crayon came to visit us to answer some of our questions, based on the events in the book.We have also used the book to focus our PSHE work on and learning about what a compliment is, Duncan didn’t receive many compliments from the crayons! 
We have been sequencing number patterns to 50 and looking at numbers that come in between two given numbers.

The children have shown great enthusiasm towards PE and our gymnastics skills and ball skills.

Please look at the Catholic life tab to see how reverent and respectful we have been in class this week and the interesting things we have learned.

Over the coming weeks, we will be focussing on our school rules and routines to ensure that we are making the most of our time in school and enjoying the fun work we will be doing.

"Mistakes are proof that we are trying."