Maths and leaves?
As we’d picked lots of different types of leaves on our walk in the woods, we looked at them closely today and were able to do some maths, too. We knew that leaves were important for photosynthesis because they collect the sun’s light. By working out the area of the leaves, we could estimate which leaf would collect the most sunlight (the leaf with the largest area).
Fab phonics
As always, we practise our spellings everyday in phonics lesson. Green group have been working on prefixes and suffixes for a lot of the year so this week we played a game to recap the double-up rule.
If you go down to the woods today…
What a great morning. Year 2 took a walk to the woods to have a look at the different types of trees we could find. Isaac turned out to be our nature specialist as he was able to tell us the names of many common trees just by looking at their leaves. Everybody had a great time and all of us were really excited about our topic learning.
Perfect planter
Having worked so hard on planting our seeds and making sure they’ve got the best environment to grow, we’ve now planted them outside in our new Y1/2 planter. Come down past the dining room to see how they’re doing. We’ve got nasturtiums, sunflowers, courgettes, tomatoes, lettuce, peppers and broad beans growing. Hopefully, we’ll have another planter soon to get all of our seedlings outside.
What’s happening this week?
Green Fingers continues and we’re moving our growing outside. New school planters have arrived so this week will see us building and planting in these. We’ll move the seedlings that have been getting on so well in the shared area into the planters to see how they do in the outside world. On Wednesday we’re going to go to the park as our learning moves from flowers to trees. We’ll be exploring the local environment to see what trees we already know the names of and which we can identify using the shape of their leaves.
Maths – Returning to multiplication means times table practice is, as always, extremely helpful for our learning in class. Go counting crazy as you walk up the stairs, travel in the car, walking to school; you could even try the 3 and 4 times tables in preparation for moving into Year 3. As part of multiplication, we’ll also be working with money so if you go to the shop and buy 3 oranges at 50p each, see if we can tell you how much by using our 5 times table knowledge.
English – Entering the world of SPAG (Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar), we’ll be recapping nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Use Post It notes to label your house’s nouns then go round again and add an adjective to each one. Play verb charades then make it harder by adding an adverbs.
- common noun – a thing (you can precede with ‘a’ or ‘the’) like ‘the table‘ or ‘a dishcloth‘
- adjective – add information to the noun like ‘a square table’ or ‘the wonderful garden’
- verb – an action like ‘to sing‘ or ‘to dance‘
- adverb – describes how, where or when you perform an action like ‘I sang beautifully‘ or ‘I danced on the table’
Free tennis lessons
Free tennis lessons (for children and adults) are available locally at David Lloyd and Roundhay Park over the next few months.
What’s happening this week?
Our plant topic continues and we’re starting to see the fruits of our labour.
This week, we’ll see our plants moving outside into planters so see if you can spot them and see how they’re progressing.
Maths – As we’re watching our plants grow, we’re going to practise our ruler skills so that we can measure the height of our plants and continue doing so as they grow. Additionally, we’ll be looking at temperature. When do we measure temperature? How does temperature change throughout the year? How does temperature affect us and the world around us? We shall also look at reading scales on thermometers which will involve our being introduced to negative numbers.
English – After two weeks of writing non-fiction, our creative juices will be flowing again as we take on the character of The Hungry Caterpillar and perform, discuss and write poetry. Help at home by talking about poems you know or like and seeing how much of it you can learn and remember.
This week we begin our new SEAL theme, Changes
Following our focus on manners last week, we now begin the SEAL theme of Changes. This theme aims to equip children with an understanding of different types of change, positive and negative, and common responses to change. It aims to develop knowledge, understanding and skills in three key social and emotional aspects of living and learning: motivation, managing feelings and social skills.
The key ideas and concepts behind this theme are:
- Change can be uncomfortable, because it can threaten our basic needs to feel safe and to belong
- Change can also be stimulating and welcome
- Both adults and children can experience a range of powerful and conflicting emotions as a result of change – for example, excitement, anxiety, uncertainty, loss, anger, resentment
- Worries about change can be made worse by uncertainty, lack of information, or misinformation and lack of support from others
- People’s responses to and ability to cope with change are very variable, and might be influenced by individual temperament, previous experience of change, and the nature of the change – chosen or imposed, expected or unexpected, within our control or out of our control
- Some children may welcome most forms of change and dislike routine and predictability. Other children may find even small changes very difficult.
Within school, children, who are coping with or have undergone significant change, are supported in a variety of ways:
- Our positive ethos within school
- Support systems, from staff and peers, for children who have undergone change or who maybe new to the school
- SEAL and circle time sessions where children feel safe to talk about their feelings
- Class SEAL boxes for children to record any concerns
- Preparing children wherever possible for planned changes for example, a change of class teacher, Key Stage or even school
Moortown botanists
Lab coats went on yesterday as we all turned into botanists. It was time to find out once and for what plants need to grow so we set up an experiment. We planted the same seed and gave it different conditions to see which would grow and which would not.
Here are the conditions we set up:
- soil, water, light, warmth, air
- no soil, water, light, warmth, air
- soil, no water, light, warmth, air
- soil, water, no light, warmth, air
- soil, water, light, cold place, air
- soil, water, light, warmth, no air
Plant news
Having planted all sorts of seeds last week, let’s see how they’re getting on. We’ve had them sat on a sunny window sill and they’ve been watered everyday.
The sunflowers have started growing very quickly but we’ve also got tomatoes shooting through the soil and some marigolds and courguette poking through too. They’ll be planted outside next week so you’ll be able to come and have a look.
