Harlow Carr
Year 1 and 2 had a great time at Harlow Carr today. We soaked up the sun, searched through the trees and savoured some delicious ice-cream. A full recount will follow, but the children are going to write one themselves tomorrow so I’ll save it to be in their words. Here’s the story of the day in pictures…
Creative homework
Last week’s homework was to show what plants you could see around and we had some really creative responses. Well done, Year 2.
Tennis training
Have you been watching Wimbledon? New tennis lessons are starting at Roundhay Park next week.
What’s happening this week?
The big event this week is our school trip to Harlow Carr. We’ll be going on Wednesday for the whole day so don’t forget that all of the children will need packed lunches. It’s going to be hot – hot – hot! We have school hats to protect our heads from the sun but it would be a good idea to send your child with sun-cream and a water bottle (in addition to a drink in their lunch) and make sure they’re in a skirt or shorts. As we make our way around the gardens, we’ll be spotting the well-known plants that we’ve been learning about as well as seeing what new plants we can find.
Maths – We’re revisiting fractions and time this week. Help at home by asking what time it is and making sure your child is using an analogue clock. o’clock, quarter past, half past and quarter to are important but we also need to be able to read 5, 10, 20 and 25 past and to the hour.
English – We’re finishing Year 2 with a long narrative project inspired by a picture book with no text. Reading short stories (picture books) will help the children pick up on story-telling language and find adjectives and sentences openers they can use in their own writing.
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’
Roundhay Park Fun Run
Well done to all the children (and parents!) who took part in the racing events at Roundhay Park this morning. It was great to see so many families running together and cheering each other on. Mr Catherall and I were really impressed that children from Reception through to Year 6 were involved and by everyone who entered the 1k and 5k races – enjoy a rest tomorrow!
