Welcome to Year 2

2016–17

Welcome to Year 2. 

Miss Hulbert is our Teacher.

Mrs Russell is our Teaching Assistant.

We are 29 hard working, happy  and special children.

We have a class puppet called Alfie too.

Summer 2

End of Term Ugly Bug Ball

To finish our geography topic Wonderful World we had an ugly bug ball. Here we are in the costumes that we made at school. 

We enjoyed making butterfly crafts and spider cakes.

We played lots of mini beast party games.

Maths

It was very important to learn time tables before we went into KS2. We sang songs, played games and other fun activities. At the end of the year we received our times tables certificates.

PSHE

We thought about our dreams  and the importance of a good nights sleep and then we made dream catchers.

RE

We thanked God for out wonderful talents and a successful year in Year 2.

Science

This half term we have been learning lots about our body including our organs and our bones.  One lesson we thought about our senses and tasted lots of delicious and not so delicious foods!

Topic Week Survival

What an amazing time we had on our trip to Scarborough!

We learned all about  staying safe on the beach and near water. Here we are with the lifeguards.

Paddling in the sea, getting wet and getting the teachers wet too.

Look how wet we got in the sea!

We dug holes and tunnels and joined them all up with other classes, great team work. 

Some children started to disappear!

and so did Miss Hulbert's feet!

Here is our sand volcano which even erupted!

Then we had fun getting even messier!

Look what happened to me! Hope you like my new haircut.

We all know that it is safe to swim between the red and yellow flags.

In topic week we played board games, matched flags, sang  songs and watched videos to learn all about water safety. We wrote wonderful explanation texts. You would definitly know how to safety safe near water if you read the children's fantastic writing.

Our School Election

 We voted for the Year 6 parties in the school election and wondered who would survive the vote. The Present Party won.

PE

We were silver medalists at the Leeds City Skipping Festival Final. 2nd out of 60 schools! Year 2 are skipping superstars and won lots of other bronze , silver and gold certificates for individual, pair and team skips. Well done and keep skipping.

Summer 1

Topic Week Roald Dahl

Year 2 have had a fun Roald Dahl topic week. We have been writing and singing Oompa Loompa songs, filling Mr Wonka shapes with spellings and describing our favourite characters. In Maths, we are very excited about our new sweet shop  which we are using to add money and calculate change. Our Roald Dahl art workshop has created an amazing golden gate and other props for the carnival. The children loved our Bringing Books to Life Workshop where they created a dance routine to tell the story of  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, entering the factory, moving like an Oompa-Loompa and a sweet machine and zooming up in the great glass elevator.  However, the most exciting part of the week was creating actual, real chocolate lollipops!

RE

Our Class Saint is St George and we had fun celebrating St George's day. We learned how to do traditional country dancing and morris dancing and enjoyed an English afternoon tea. 

   We wrote about how we can be like St George and wrote a prayer to go inside our cards.

We have been learning all about Pentecost and thinking what the Holy Spirit is like. We explained this through writing and art work. We celebrated Pentecost on the last Friday of half term by making hats and cards and a much needed ice lolly in the hot summer sunshine.

History

We finished our topic about people who make a difference by retelling the story of Rosa Parks. Rosa refused to move for the bus driver so the police man had to get her off the bus! We thought of so many words to describe the feelings of the black and white people on the bus and put these into amazing sentences using  subordinating and        coordianting conjunctions.

Our Wonderful World

We started our new topic by making posters to explain why our world is so wonderful and then thinking about why our world is not always so wonderful for everybody. Take a look at some of our incredible homework to start our new geography topic.

English

There are so many things that we have to include in our writing in Year 2. We all wrote wonderful stories about our day as an Oompa-Loompa. When we included all the things we have been learning about such as conjunctions, suffixes, exclamation sentences,  questions, apostrophes and many more, we won a golden ticket. 

Here we are doing outdoor spelling. We learned words with suffixes and other words we are trying to spell correctly in our writing as a team and then  did walk and talk spelling.

Maths

We are all so proud of ourselves for understanding all the arithmetic methods we have learned  and all the ways to tackle reasoning and problem solving questions that we went onto the game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire. We had to phone a few friends and ask the audience a few times and then we did it! We won one million pounds! 

PHOTOGRAPH

Science

As part of learning about the life cycles of different animals, we watched with excitement as  our butterflies formed cocoons and then turned into butterflies and as the chicks in YR hatched.

In ICT we have been nature photographers and we are going to learn how to edit the photographs on the computer. We have spotted some wonderful signs of spring and summer although it has proved a little difficult to  take a photograph of a butterfly.  It was very exciting though, when we spotted a hedgehog on the school field!

We  looked at the observable features of mini  beasts. Here we are on our mini beast hunt. Then finally we put woodlice in a choice chamber to observe which habitat they preferred. We had to be careful none escaped in the classroom.

Spring 2

Topic Week Wonderful Water

We started the week learning lots of facts about water including uses of water, who needs water, water around the world and living things in the water. We wrote non-fiction reports and made sea creatures. 

We thought about people who do not have access to running water in their homes. We did a sponsored walk carrying water. We all walked one mile, even though it was difficult, to try to understand what it would feel like to have to do this every day before school. Thank you fro all your generous contributions to Water Aid. We also completed water  challenges to work as a team. 

We learned that families in other countries have to make their own taps and we made tippy taps. 

PE

Year 2 had so much fun at the skipping festival. We won lots of bronze, silver and gold awards and were the overall winner which means we are through to the Leeds City Final. The children have learned  lots of different skipping skills and worked together as a team,  well done!

Multi-skills festival PHGS

Year 2 have been learning lots of skills in PE. At Prince Henry's Grammar School the children demonstrated great multi-skills, excellent teamwork and even cool dance moves!

RE

Happy Easter from Year 2

Here are our Easter cards

We retold the Easter story  with our fabulous  writing  and also with hand print painting.

During Lent we held a stations of the cross morning where we took part in a carousel of activities and prayer to learn all about Jesus' journey to the cross. 

Year 2 class assembly all about making a difference

Our class assembly was all about making a difference. We performed a poem about Florence Nightingale, thought about how we could make a difference and sang songs with an important message: little things can make a big difference to others.

St Joseph's Day

We celebrated St Joseph's day. The day started with Mass and then we made crosses, wrote about St Joseph  and created St Joseph's day card. the day finished with a fun afternoon to celebrate our school Saint.

Happy Mother's Day

Thank you Mini Vinnies for organising a fun games afternoon to raise money for the Good Shepherd Appeal. 

English

We celebrated World Book Day by writing our very first St Joseph's story. Every class wrote part of the story and it was very exciting when the story was unveiled in assembly. We were authors and illustrators of our own books called who lives in a house like this? The day was filled  with lots of other activities including writing jokes for our school joke wall, a book scavenger hunt and singing the World Book Day song.

We have been working hard to read 90 words a minute fluently.

We have also been weather forecasters, learning lots of weather vocabulary, writing  weather reports and performing weather forecasts. 

We have been reading even more. Lots of us can  read 90 words a minute now!

Maths

Fractions of amounts, fractions of shapes, fractions of length and weight. We have learned lots about fractions using lots of practical equipment. We were given challenges and investigations too, to work out how many different ways you can make 1/2 and to understand equivalent fractions.

Here we are estimating and measuring capacity in wonderful water week.

Science

This half term we have learned all about plants. We know what they need to survive, how they grow and what different parts of the plant do. We observed over time what happens if you change different conditions and planted our own bean seeds and watched them grow.

Spring 1

Topic Week Marvellous Mechanisms

In topic week we planned, designed, created and evaluated vehicles. We investigated different types of vehicles, looked at how vehicles move and decided which materials would and would not  be suitable for vehicles. Here are some of our investigations and vehicles.

We completed a traffic survey counting different types of vehicles and colours of cars. This was turned into tally charts, block graphs and pictograms. We then answered some difficult questions about our data. 

We even sat on a digger, we were very excited!

We made books all about our vehicles.

English

We started this term writing opinions about the twisted tales we had read. Fantastic opinions included why  the woolly sheep was not so woolly and why grown ups should read Rumpelstiltskin to help them believe in gnomes, pixies and goblins!

We have been enjoying our library time in the new library and borrowed some exciting new books. 

It was a very exciting morning when we received a letter from  Little Rabbit who lives in the school grounds. He wanted to know what the children do after school so they wrote letters back. We have been trying to write different types of sentences so the letters included lots of questions. A few days later we got another letter which answered the children's questions and included some information that Little Rabbit's granny and grandad had found out from children in 1950's. This was very helpful as we were learning about what life was like  when Elizabeth became Queen.

We read Beatrix Potter stories and retold Peter Rabbit  through story mapping and actions. The class  was divided into two and half the class were Peter Rabbit and the other half   were Mr McGregor. We played feeling tennis and then  wrote letters to each other expressing  feelings about our experiences in the garden and our hopes for the future. 

Maths

We have enjoyed singing lots of times tables songs and here we are learning about groups of numbers, practicing times tables, playing games and writing division as the inverse of multiplication.

RE

We have been learning all about good news; how we can spread good news and  good news bible stories. At the start of Lent we painted stations of the cross.

History

We are learning about people who have made a difference and we have started learning about the Queen. We have  written very interesting job descriptions for the Queen and  created beautiful portraits. 

We took part in the Queen's Coronation. The Archbishop of Canterbury lead the service. The children took on lots of important roles during the recognition, anointing, investiture and enthroning. The congregation sang the national anthem and the official royal photographer took the photographs. 

We made time capsules about a time in history when someone made a difference.

Chinese New Year

After learning the story of Chinese New Year, we enjoyed Chinese food and some of us did Chinese writing too.

Science

We  sorted materials and labelled their properties. We tested if materials are strong, flexible, waterproof and  durable.

PE

We have been practicing skipping for the skipping festival and learning lots of gymnastics skills. Here are some of our balances.

Music

In music lessons we got to make so much noise with instruments and learned lots of music vocabulary.

Autumn 2

Topic Week Films

Our film in Year 2 was The Wizard of Oz. We visited the Wizard of Otley and  asked for help with our wishes. We clicked our heels together and  our wishes came true. We visited wonderful places and wrote setting descriptions. We made rainbows and wrote about our dreams.

In Science we made a tornado in a bottle and  learned how spinning the bottle creates a force which pulls the water into the middle. We made a rainbow in a bottle too and learned how different colours travel at different speeds. Very advanced science for Year 2!

In maths we estimated and measured the yellow brick road, learning about units of length and measuring to the nearest cm.

We worked in groups to make the Wizard of Oz characters.

RE

In collective worship we have been thinking about the meaning of advent and the words Hope, Peace, Love and Joy. As advent angels we have tried to show these gifts during advent.

We thought about people who  may not have a present at Christmas and helped wrap the shoe boxes for the Christmas Shoe Box Appeal. Our school created 175 boxes! Thank you for all your support. 

Christmas

Merry Christmas from Year 2

We retold the story of Jesus' birth  in our Christmas Performance Jesus' Christmas Party. We also wrote the story in RE.

Christmas Craft Day

We had lots of fun making a Christmas card, calendar and tree decoration.

Christmas dinner was delicious!

Christmas Tree Festival

We visited the Christmas Tree Festival at Otley Parish Church and sang Christmas Carols.

Christmas Party Day

We made party hats, Christmas pudding cakes and reindeer dust. We had lots of fun playing party games and then eating party food, singing and dancing in the hall. We had a very special visitor, Father Christmas.

English

We read different traditional tales with a twist  and had lots of fun at our porridge pot party; writing and performing poems, making porridge and writing instructions. The best bit was eating the porrridge!

Our outdoor learning included interviewing a tree to learn alternative ee phonemes.

Maths

We learned what equals really means and thought about equals using scales.

We use cuisinaire rods to work out missing numbers and understand the bar model.

Science

In science this half term we have been learning about living things and their habitats. We created habitats for mini creatures. In our science books we described how the habitat provides for the needs of living things. They provided food, water, shelter, comfort and even fun!

It was lots of fun at the science festival. We learned all about science related to Jack and the Beanstalk including how cows and humans digest food and how beanstalks grow. Miss Hulbert got some rather horrible homework to do!

Geography

This half term we have been learning about Otley and finding out what Explorer Bear would like to do in our town. Here is the first research we did on the I-Pads. Then we made books that would tell visitors about Otley.

We also had fun playing on our new adventure playground.