Autumn 2
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Literacy
In Literacy, we used our listening and communication skills to share a range of stories and their morals. We discussed why voting is important and we demonstrated our understanding of this when we voted for our School Council leader. In writing, we used our sounds, capital letters, finger spaces, question marks and exclamation marks to write about different topics. Most recently, we used our listening and teamwork skills to listen to a story about our new topic ‘The Great Fire of London.’

Topic (History)
In History, we have been learning about ‘The Great Fire of London’ and the children have been extremely enthusiastic to learn about how the fire started and the impact it had on London. We have looked at a range of sources such as information books, images and researched some information about who, where and how the fire started.
Year 2 also enjoyed their first trip of the year, we visited St Paul’s Cathedral for a tour around the cathedral, then off to London bridge, Pudding Lane and finally finished off the day by using our artistic skills to sketch the Monument.

Maths
In Maths, we have been continuing to develop our resilience when developing our mathematical skills through learning about place value and the properties of a number. We have used concrete objects such as dienes to understand place value and manipulated them to create a range of numbers in the hundreds, tens and units. The key vocabulary that we focussed on was ‘place value, amount, tens, ones/units, hundreds and same value, different appearance’.

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Spring 2 has been another busy half term for Year 2!
Literacy
This half term Year 2s have become experts at persuasive writing. How wonderful! We learned about the different features of persuasive language (using exclamations and questions, the power of 3, emotive language, and so on) to write a letter to the evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, begging her not to kill us (please, please oh generous, wonderful and merciful Queen!). We also continued using our persuasive skills to convince visitors to visit Ghana, our focus for Topic (Geography) this term. You won’t want to miss it!

Maths
We started this half term with some really tricky maths – but our children tackled tricky column addition (and for some of us, column subtraction) with aplomb. We then moved onto measures and reading scales for the rest of the half term, with plenty of opportunities for practical activities such as measuring length with trundle wheels, weighing mass with scales and measuring volume with measuring jugs.

Topic (Geography)
As we geared up for International Week, we focused on comparing Ghana and the UK for Spring 2. We started with exploratory learning on the laptops, looking at Google Earth and learning directional language to locate Ghana and neighbouring countries. We recapped and expanded our knowledge about the continents, oceans, the equator, as well as physical and human features to describe and compare the 2 capital cities.

This term our topic has been comparing Ghana and the UK. We used resilience and used maps to locate Ghana and identify its human and physical features. Through this we learnt about the different continents and oceans. With what we have learnt about comparing Ghana and the UK we used our innovation skills to prepare for our International week.

In Literacy we have been looking at features of a persuasive letter and leaflet. We used our reflection skills from letters we’ve written in the past to help us write our letters. With this, it also helped us writing a persuasive leaflet persuading people to visit Ghana.



Maths this term has been about looking at units of measure. We explored a range of different ways we measure different objects and identified the most appropriate unit to measure in. We used our teamwork skills and worked with our partner to read measurements.


Literacy
In Literacy, we used our listening and communication skills to share a range of stories and their morals. In democracy week, we shared a story about voting and spoke about why it is important. We used our sounds, capital letters, finger spaces, question marks and exclamation marks to write about the story. Mr Cameron also came to talk to us about what makes a good leader. We then had the opportunity to vote for our school council leader to represent our class.

In History, we have been learning about ‘The Great Fire of London’ and the children have been extremely enthusiastic to learn about how the fire started and the impact it had on London. The children have developed their communication skills and reflective skills to think about how the fire had an effect on London.
Year 2 also enjoyed their first trip of the year, we visited St Paul’s Cathedral for a tour around the cathedral, then off to London bridge, Pudding Lane and finally finished off the day by using our artistic skills to sketch the Monument.



In Maths, we have been continuing to develop our resilience when developing our mathematical skills through learning about place value and the properties of a number. We have used concrete objects such as the dienes to understand place value. We have also worked hard to develop our mathematical vocabulary of ‘greater than’ and ‘less than’ when working with numbers.

Topic
Our Science topic, we explored animals and their habitats. To support our learning, we visited Colchester Zoo, where we looked at animals from around the world and learnt about their natural habitats. Applying our reading skills, we enjoyed learning lots of facts about the animals. Back at school we linked our learning to the trip- for example, in Science we drew food chains including some of the animals we had seen and what they eat.

Maths
We have been preparing for our Geography Day at Chalkwell Beach where we investigated the question ‘How have humans impacted the environment?’ In Maths we created our own tally charts to collect data about transport, litter, amenities and wildlife at Chalkwell. We have been practising our tallying and data analysis skills ready for our trip to the beach. We worked as a team to find out the information and shared this with our peers.

Literacy
What a wonderful time we had on our last Big Outcome of Year 2! Our parents and carers were invited in to join us for our Poetry Afternoon where we performed a range of poems. In Literacy we prepared for this by exploring poetry and reading these out loud with expression and actions. Using features of poems we had learnt about, such as similes, rhyme and rhythm, we wrote our own poems about our favourite animals following our trip to the zoo. Having our parents/carers in school was such a lovely way to end the year.

We have enjoyed all of our fun learning activities this year and we have some wonderful memories of our time together in Year 2. We are looking forward to many more exciting experiences in Year 3!
























