Elder and Hazel Classes
Welcome back to the Year 2 page.
Please find below our curriculum map, this is so you can see what we are learning about through the year.
Summer term
Our summer term topic is 'Blue Planet'. We started the term by learning about the impact of pollution on our oceans and seas and made some class pledges. We also used recycled materials to make some sea animal crafts. We have developed our understanding of our impact on the planet through out learning about David Attenborough. We wrote some amazing non-chronological reports using features such as sub-headings, formal language, subordinate conjunctions and captions.
During the summer term year two have been thinking about moving on and changes. We have discussed physical changes and thought about what jobs we may want to do when we are older. We have been practising our year two Leavers Assembly, ready for us to celebrate our time at Burrsville and celebrate the end of the last three years.
Year two had lots of exciting events this term. We went on a trip to Clacton beach to further develop our geography learning on physical features. Whilst there we had a talk from the beach patrol as part of 'Water Safety Week'. We also took part in our 7 b4 7 experience of 'Messing Around with Water'. During this day we made junk model rafts in groups and raced them. We paddled and splashed each other! We took a water shaker home to remember our day. We also had sports day so we were able to showcase all of the skills we have been learning in P.E. Our final event is our leavers party and 'Night Under the Stars', another 7 b4 7 promise.
Science and DT - making a healthy snack
This term we have been learning about different food types, what makes a healthy snack and how to follow a design criteria. Today, all of our learning came together. We had researched, identified and now we have finally made our healthy snacks. The children thoroughly enjoyed cutting up all of the fruits and snacks for their plates. They enjoyed sharing a snack with a friend and discussing what they liked and disliked.
World Book Day - Thursday 2nd March
What a fantastic day we have had! The children had a fantastic day dressed up as their favourite book character and showing them off during our whole school assembly. One child from each class was chosen for 'best dressed' and won a book! We then started our fun filled reading day. We moved around the classes completing an activity based on reading or book characters. We had a great time!
Skipping day - Wednesday 1st March
We had our annual visit from Dan the skipping man and had a great time. Both Hazel and Elder (as well as the rest of the school) went to the hall to spend some time with Dan. During this time we learnt how to skip forwards, backwards and a variety of tempos. At the end of the day we had a whole school assembly where we showed off our newly learnt skills to one another.
Planetarium Visit
We were so lucky in Year 2 today to have a visit from a special company who set up our very own Planetarium. As we stepped foot inside the dome we were greeted by a large space and a projector. When the projector was turned on we were amazed to see the beautiful dome filled with stars. We spent some time looking at the stars and identifying the Milky Way. We then moved onto looking at the planets, we learnt all about the giant planets and looked at home close they were to the moon and sun. Finally, we looked at what NASA have predicted some planets will be like in the future and discussed the impact future space travel will have and what it might look like. It was such a fun, cool experience that not only Year 2 enjoyed, but also Year 1.
In Year 2 we enjoyed making rockets to zoom to the moon! This was part of our sparkling start as well as our Design and Technology. We have spent a few weeks learning about joining materials and different ways to suit different materials. We enjoyed putting the joins to the test when making rockets again.
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Spring term
We started the term with the Sparkling Start to our topic, 'To Infinity and Beyond'. We watched a clip of a rocket landing in our school forest! Then we went out to the forest and there it was! It was then our turn to be inventors and 'Make Something Amazing', as part of our 7 Before 7 promises. We made our own rockets and had a class rocket launch. We finished the day by designing our own planets.
We have now come to the end of Autumn 2 and the children have been working hard to consolidate their knowledge. In maths, we have been looking at the properties of 2D and 3D shapes. We have had lots of fun grouping them and understanding all the differences between them. Also this term, Year 2 have got into character for the nativity 'Born in a Barn', and have done a fantastic job at learning all their lines for their own characters and for all of the fabulous songs!
In Autumn 2 we celebrated our learning with a trip to Colchester Castle. We have been learning about the features of a castle in history and have discussed who would've lived here and the jobs they have, so this trip enabled us to explore this further.
Exciting events this half term have included some of us starting swimming lessons, the Harvest Festival service at the church and taking part in The Reach2 Colour Run!
Autumn term 2022
We started our English learning with character and setting description. We used the book 'Zog' to help us with this, which is written by our Author of the Term, Julia Donaldson. This linked nicely to our 'Troublesome Dragons' topic. We then moved on to learning about poems focused on Harvest Festival. Our next unit of work is narrative and we are using the 'George and the Dragon' to help us learn how to write a story. We will then write our own stories about dragons.
We started our learning with an exciting Sparkling Start, a dragon egg hunt in the forest! We had to find clues which then spelt out 'sweet treat' and we had a little reward for completing the hunt.
This half term our maths learning has been on place value. We have been learning to order numbers and talk about the number of tens and ones in a number and how they can be represented in different ways. We used the part-whole model to partition numbers into tens and ones. We have moved on to counting in 2s, 5s, 10s and 3s.