Stay safe and well
All the Year 2 adults would like to wish all the children and their families a happy and healthy Christmas. We hope their glitter bottles come in useful if things get a bit exciting over the next few days!
Thank you for all your support this term. The children have been fantastic and they continue to make us proud. Here’s a few pictures from their Christmas party and lunch this week.
Stay safe and well and see you in the new year!
We are scientists
This half term, Year 2 have enjoyed lots of practical science in our working scientifically learning.
We’ve done lots of investigating, sorting, identifying, comparing and predicting and the children are becoming more familiar with all of this scientific vocabulary.
We’ve also been revising some of our previous learning.
Ask your child about these pictures.
Christmas
Yesterday was a busy day in Year 2 with our production filming in the morning and then enjoying a movie afternoon. Thank you to the PTA for our movie snacks.
The children have all done incredibly well learning their lines, songs and actions for this year’s Whoops a Daisy Angel production. They also coped with the last minute change of performing on their own without Year 1 and Reception. We are very proud of them all and we hope you enjoy watching the video with them at home.
Whoops a Daisy Angel cast
Living and Learning: Physical health and fitness
Our latest Living and Learning lessons have been all about physical health and fitness. Here are the main age related expectations for this learning.
Firstly, we remembered how much exercise children should do each day (60 minutes – 30 minutes in school and 30 minutes out of school).
How can we achieve that target? We thought about all the ways to keep active including:
- active travel to and from school
- skipping at playtimes
- brain breaks in lessons
- active games at lunchtime
- after-school clubs
- Junior parkrun
- going on a bike ride
- playing outside
Then, it was time to get active and have a brain break.
We know how much exercise is needed to keep our bodies healthy but what are the benefits of physical activity? Ask your child if the following statements are true or false.
Finally, we thought about what to do if we were worried about our health.
Tell a trusted adult.
Tell my parents.
Tell my teachers.
Ask my friends.
Write it down in the Living and Learning box.
Descriptive writing
Over the past few weeks, Year 2 have been working really hard on their descriptive writing. The stimulus for our writing was a famous piece of art by Leonardo da Vinci called ‘The Last Supper’.
Children were tasked with writing sentences using adjectives and expanded noun phrases to describe The Last Supper.
Here are a few examples of the descriptive sentences we wrote in our writing:
The men are eating boring, tasteless food.
In the dark room, the bearded men all look serious.
They are wearing old-fashioned clothes.
Jesus is wearing a blue and orange gown.
On the long table, there is a white tablecloth.
Skipping ropes for sale
This year we are continuing to work with Skipping School to develop the children’s skipping skills. Skipping School ropes (KS1 ropes and longer KS2 ropes) are now available to buy from the office.
Girls rugby opportunity
Leos Junior Rugby Club are hosting a girls only training session, open to all girls in Reception to Year 6, on Sunday 28th November, with the aim of setting up a girls only rugby team in the area. Please see below for more information.
Living and Learning: Anti-bullying week
We have continued to have an anti-bullying theme to our learning this week.
One Kind Word has been this years’ key message and we created our own kindness wall to spread this message.
Our fluency text this week, which we read daily, is based on our child friendly anti-bullying policy. As part of these sessions, we discuss the vocabulary used in the text. We often use word hippo to check any definitions or to find synonyms for words to help us to understand their meaning.
Another reading activity involved understanding word definitions where the children had to sort the words into bullying and anti-bullying words.
This reading activity is called a RIC where the children answer questions about the text – some answers may be in the text (retrieval questions), others may need some more thought and interpretation.
Alongside discussing what bullying is, we considered how someone might feel if they were being bullied and how it would affect their mental health. The children generated a great list of emotions when thinking about this.
Finally, we reinforced the importance of the STOP message in our school.
STOP stands for two things:
- the definition of bullying: Several Times On Purpose
- the solution for bullying: Start Telling Other People
Well done Year 2 – you have showed great understanding around the subject of bullying.
Living and Learning: Odd socks day
It was great to see so many odd socks today – thank you for supporting this start to anti-bullying week.
Odd socks day is a great way to celebrate what makes us all unique! Odd Socks Day is held in partnership with Andy and the Odd Socks. Have a listen to their song for this year.
The theme for this year’s anti-bullying week is One Kind Word. One kind word can lead to another and today we sent a wave of kindness through the class by giving compliments to each other. We saw how kindness fuels kindness. We also made some kindness pledges.
Look back tomorrow for more learning about how to STOP bullying.
Art Gallery Trip
Today, we enjoyed a wonderful visit to Leeds Art Gallery. The visit links well with our Art topic this half term. All the children behaved impeccably and represented our school really well. We hope you have enjoyed talking about our trip at home.
At the gallery, we used shapes as inspiration to create our very own abstract art. Using view finders we found our favourite part and described what we could see. What shapes can you see? What does it remind you of?
We also looked at some of the wonderful pieces of art in the gallery. We used our bodies to make shapes that represent the art.
We enjoyed looking at different pieces of abstract art and discussing the colours, shapes and lines in each piece.
We also looked at some figurative art. We then drew round our bodies (in poses like those in the art) to add even more lines and shapes to our whole class abstract art piece.
