Welcome to Year 2, Summer Term 2016  

Our topic this term is 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' and children in Year 2 will be transformed into nature detectives as they investigate all creatures (great and small) and their habitats. Keep visiting our class page to share our learning journey and keep up with all the action and adventure! 

11th July: This week we have designed and built bird feeders in D.T. We started by learning all about birds and their food sources. After that we looked closely at a selection of bird feeders, exploring the materials they were made out of and the purpose of their features, e.g perches, hangers, feeding trays, etc. Then we practised joining materials in different ways and used our knowledge to help us design our own bird feeders. We worked hard to make them strong and purposeful and think the birds will love them! 

29th June: It's been another busy day for the children in Year 2, although today there were no animals involved, just ukuleles! We were very lucky to be able to attend the first ever 'Grand Ukulele Gathering' at the Guildhall. The event was hosted by PYMS and we were one of three schools to participate (our children were the youngest). It was a superb day - we learned 3 new songs; 12 Bar Blues, A Sailor Went to Sea and Three Little Birds. At the end of the day we all performed our songs on stage - you can hear a few snippets below. Enjoy!

28th June: A big thank you to Mrs Preston and her husband Keith who visited us in school this afternoon to talk to us about bee keeping. Keith has 4 hives with around 50,000 honey bees in each. He showed us the different sections of the hive and described how the bees worked together to make honey. We looked at beeswax, empty honeycomb and even had a taste of his delicious honey. We're all going to try and plant more flowers in our gardens to help bees survive.

Monday 27th June: To help us learn more about different species of animals, Year 2 had a day at Dartmoor Zoo. It was a fun and interesting experience. We saw so many fascinating animals; playful meerkats; hungry (and very noisy) otters; a brave and bossy peacock; lazy lions; a jaguar at feeding time; and many more. The children used their scientific understanding to identify carnivores and herbivores, mammals, amphibians and reptiles. I was so impressed with the interest they showed in everything we saw. It was a super day out!

We've been helping some post-graduate students from Plymouth University with their research. They wanted to find out whether a robot could help us with our numeracy skills. The robot kept getting the answers to sums wrong, so we had to try and correct it. It was tricky work, but fun to interact with the robot and we loved it when it waved or danced!

We've been learning all about our bodies and how to keep healthy. Our moldy bread experiment taught us the importance of keeping our hands clean and washing them thoroughly after we've been to the toilet, so for homework we created posters to put in all the toilets across the school. Take a look at some of the imaginative designs below.

                  Look back at Year 2, Spring Term 2016  

I wish you all a very Happy Easter and leave you with a photo of the beautiful Easter tree we created using the children's homework projects. Enjoy the holiday and I will see you all back at school on Monday 11th April.

Hello from all the explorers in Year 2! It's been an exciting term as we've taken to the air, sailed the high seas and blasted off to outer space in our topic, 'To the Edge of the World'. Whether we've been dancing, writing our ship's diary, investigating sailing boats, re-enacting the past or building galleons and hot air balloons, we've had great fun learning all about Columbus and Neil Armstrong and their voyages of discovery. 

 Many thanks to the staff at the Co-op for running an Easter card competition. Sylvia came into class this afternoon to announce the winners. Well done to Liberty, Oliver and Kye, pictured here with their winning entries. 

We've been busy investigating floating and sinking to find out what materials would be best to build a boat. Here's what we discovered in our groups;

Then we thought about how we could make a boat travel faster across the water. We had lots of ideas, but could only test one variable each time. In our first experiment we changed the force of the air. Ethan used a stopwatch to measure time and Amelie recorded the results. 

   The force of the hair dryer made the boat travel the fastest! Next we explored whether the size of the sail would affect the time it takes a boat to cross the water.

We all made boats with different size sails, then we tested them on the water using a fan. We discovered that the larger sails made the boats travel faster, but ...if the sail was too large the boat tipped over and capsized!

We have such creative children and parents in Year 2. Just look at a few of the extraordinary galleons that were made for homework.

Today we was our Columbus adventure day. We came to school dressed as C15th sailors and prepared to set sail on our own voyage of discovery. There was lots to do before we could board the ship!

Creating scary sea monsters!

Baking ship's biscuits to eat on our long journey.

Making maps and telescopes to help us find land in the West.

Finally we were able to set sail!

We climbed the rigging and kept watch for land (and sea monsters!).

Oh no! A terrible storm made some of us sea sick.

Lamis kept watch and told everyone the time ...scrub the decks, fix the sails!

Time for a rest and a bite to eat ...but we're not sure we like those ship's biscuits.
Luckily, when we reached 'the Indies' we were able to try all sorts of new and delicious foods that we hadn't seen in Europe before, like avocados, mango, pineapple, dark chocolate, sweet corn and grapefruit.
We had an amazing adventure, but thankfully sailed back just in time for the half term holiday!

02.02.16: We were lucky enough to be invited to the Guildhall to see a musical performance by 'Travelling by Tuba'. The children were captivated by the highly entertaining show and the range of rather unusual instruments.

29.01.16: Miss Wilson has introduced the children to yoga. They are so enthusiastic and focused during the sessions as you can see from some of these photographs.

Many thanks to those of you who came to watch our class assembly. I thought the 'Year 2 Place Value Squad' were in tip top condition and thoroughly enjoyed watching them being kept in order by our extremely confident maths sergeants.

Look back at the Autumn Term 2015

We've had such a busy term - take a look at a few photos to see some of the fun we've been having.

Festive fun and frolics in our class party!

Christmas dinner was delicious! 

Getting ready for Christmas ... we had such fun making all sorts of decorations to turn KS1 into a winter wonderland!

Having written our own stories based on 'The Day Jake Vacuumed', we were thrilled to welcome local author, Simon James to Year 2. We had a lovely afternoon, enjoying stories, learning about his life and we even had a painting demonstration. At the end of the afternoon several parents came in and we read our own stories to them.

16.10.15: This week's 'Star of the Week' is Kelsey. She has worked her socks off trying to learn her +/- facts to 5 and has shown a great improvement in her confidence. Fantastic!

We were lucky to have children's author, Abie Longstaff at school this afternoon. She shared some of her stories with the Year 1 and 2 children and answered their questions about what it's like to be an author. Many thanks both to Abie, and Julia Hale from the Plymouth School's Library Service.

I very much enjoyed meeting all the Year 2 mums and dads at this week's parents evenings, and a big well done to each and every one of you for helping your children to create such fantastic 'number creatures' for their homework. They are scattered around our classroom and will definitely help the children with counting in tens. Here are a few examples - sorry I can't display them all!

09.10.15: Another busy week is over! Our 'Star of the Week' is Harry C. He has shown such enthusiasm for learning this week, making great contributions when writing a group poem and massively improving his number bond test score. This week, our Year 2 Courtesy Cup was awarded to Catarina, who has shown super manners since she arrived at our school 3 weeks ago! Well done.

We had our e-safety superhero day on Wednesday and learned about lots of different ways to stay safe when using the internet and other devices. I was really impressed with the children's understanding.
Take a look at Jessica's great safety poster.

02.10.15: Our 'Star of the Week' is Ana I have been particularly impressed with her ability to focus on independent tasks and achieve the best she can. During a discussion around education in the past, Ana showed great maturity in her thinking and could even express her views on equality! Also, well done to Catherine who received our Year 2 Courtesy Cup this week. She was particularly kind and helpful to another member of the class and always has lovely manners.

Ukulele lessons are in full swing - we've learned how to play the notes GCEA and have tried a class performance of 'My Dog has Fleas'! We're aiming to treat you to some musical brilliance at our class assembly on 21st October. Take a look at the rock stars of the future!

25.09.15: Well done to Jing who is our 'Star of the Week' He showed amazing progress with learning his number facts to 5 and scored 20/20 in 47 seconds in our test on Wednesday! Look out for him wearing his shiny new star badge.

We've enjoyed more poetry in Literacy this week, focusing on poems with a pattern. The children have all written their own poems based on 'I'm Just Going Out' by Michael Rosen. Here are 2 stunning examples, the first written by Catherine and the second by Ana.

18.09.15: Well done to Novak who is our 'Star of the Week'
We also celebrated with Jessica, who became a friend of Jesus during the summer holidays, and Millie, who achieved her Grade 1 award from Trinity College London for Speech and Drama and Group Drama. Well done girls!

We've been having fun learning how to use alliteration this week. Read our silly class poem to find out what it's really like in Year 2 (just kidding!). Every child wrote a funny line for the poem.

An Ordinary Day in Year 2

It’s just an ordinary day in Year 2 … or is it?
There’s;
Charming Charlie chasing a Chinese chimpanzee,
Hairy Harry hurrying to the huge hall,
Amazing Ana acting like an ant in April,
Jolly John juggling jelly beans,
Noisy Nikola nibbling some nuts,
Munching Millie mending the moon,
Jazzy Jazmine jumping on her jacket,
Naughty Novak nattering to Nikola,
Olympic Oliver on top of an octopus ,
Jiggling Jago joking with Jamie,
King Kye kicking kangaroos,
Mighty Max munching bananas like a monkey,
Jellyfish Joseph juggling jelly beans,
Cute Catherine cooking coconut cookies,
Brilliant Brodie bouncing like a baboon,
Excited Emily eating eggs,
Jiggling Jamie jumping over a jigsaw,
Gigantic Jake juggling juicy jellies,
Lovely Lamis licking large lollipops,
Jumping Jing jigging around his jacket,
Kind Kelsey cuddling a kangaroo,
Acrobatic Amelie adding up animals,
Big Brooke bouncing on the bookcase,
Juicy Jessica juggling giant jellies,
And …
Energetic Ethan eating an excited elephant!

On Tuesday 15th September the children visited the National Marine Aquarium to take part in a STEMfest event. They joined in enthusiastically in a range of activities based around Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Have a look at some of the photos below.