This term in Geography, we have been having discussions and locating the continents and oceans on a world map and globe. We also had the opportunity to sort the physical and human features in Ghana and make comparisons to the UK. We thoroughly enjoyed our African drumming workshop and were able to perform this in front of our parents/carers and listened to traditional Ghanaian music.

Maths

In Maths, we have continued to develop our teamwork and communication skills through exploring measurements for capacity, mass and reading scales with different increments. We have also been learning about positional and directional language. We worked as a team to give our partners directions to travel from one area to another.

Literacy

In Literacy, we have continued to develop our writing skills and most recently wrote a persuasive leaflet on why people should visit Ghana. We worked as a team to read a range of leaflets to use as examples. We ensured we used persuasive language, questions, exclamation marks and commands to persuade our audience to visit Ghana.

The children are expanding their vocabulary by learning new words and phrases such as front cover, back cover, pages, author, and title. They have been actively using their imagination and experimenting with a variety of materials and resources to bring stories to life. Both independently and in small groups, the children have enjoyed creating pretty cottages and story settings for the characters, using different media and materials to express their ideas.

We have been introducing and modelling new words for the children and encouraging them to use this vocabulary in their play as they acted out familiar stories, including making Goldilocks’ Breakfast using yogurt, strawberries, raspberries, mango and blueberries; yummy! Working as a team, they carefully checked the ingredients and followed simple instructions to prepare their own breakfast.

By listening to the stories and using real objects, the children have been learning and using new descriptive words such as big, medium, and small. They confidently matched the characters to the correct-sized beds, bowls, chairs, and spoons, showing their growing understanding through hands-on play.

Thank you for taking the time to read. Next term, we are excited to explore our new theme, “People Who Help Us.”

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Topic

We had a fantastic start to our Summer term with the arrival of our ducklings! This has supported our topic on ‘Animals including humans’ where we had the chance to talk about what they need to survive. We all had a chance to visit the library and observe the ducklings in the paddling pool. We used our communication skills to ask questions and listen to the information. Year 2, continued to develop their reading skills and used a piece of text about ducklings to read and answer some comprehension questions.

Maths

In Maths, we had the opportunity to learn about time and used concrete resources such as clocks to support our understanding. We talked about our day and looked at our class visual timetables. We spoke about what we do at certain points in the day. We learnt about how many minutes there are in an hour, how many hours in a day and recapped the days of the weeks and months. We used our resilience to practise telling the time and answering reasoning questions.  

Literacy

In Literacy, we used ‘colourful stories’ to listen and retell the story of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’. Once we were confident using our communication skills to talk about the different parts of the story, we then drew our own story boards. This helped us write a narrative of the story, getting the events in the correct order. We have been working hard to ensure we use a range of exciting vocabulary, expanded noun phrases and the correct punctuation. Year 2 have also worked extremely hard on their handwriting, ensuring we are forming our letters accurately and some have started to join their writing.

This term in Geography, we have been having discussions and locating the continents and oceans on a world map and globe. We also had the opportunity to sort the physical and human features in Ghana and make comparisons to the UK. We thoroughly enjoyed our African drumming workshop and were able to perform this in front of our parents/carers and listened to traditional Ghanaian music.

Maths

In Maths, we have continued to develop our teamwork and communication skills through exploring measurements for capacity, mass and reading scales with different increments. We have also been learning about positional and directional language. We worked as a team to give our partners directions to travel from one area to another.

Literacy

In Literacy, we have continued to develop our writing skills and most recently wrote a persuasive leaflet on why people should visit Ghana. We worked as a team to read a range of leaflets to use as examples. We ensured we used persuasive language, questions, exclamation marks and commands to persuade our audience to visit Ghana.

This term our topic is ‘People who Fought for our Rights’ and we have been learning about some significant people such as Nelson Mandela, Florence Nightingale, Rosa Parks, Gandhi, Emmeline Pankhurst and Mary Seacole. We used ‘Now Press Play’ to develop our listening and drama skills to act out being Florence and how hard she worked being a nurse. We ensured we used our ‘Curwen Core skills’ such as teamwork, empathy and communication to discuss our opinions.

We have developed our history skills including ordering events chronologically on a timeline and using sources of information to find out about the past. We have thoroughly enjoyed learning facts, watching videos and sharing our thoughts.

Literacy

In Literacy, we have continued to develop our writing skills through writing a diary entry imagining we were Nelson Mandela. We used role play to imagine how he felt when he was put into prison and used emotive language to describe how he may have felt. We demonstrated resilience and strived for success through ensuring that we used a range of adjectives, conjunctions, exclamations and questions to vary our writing.

Maths

This term one of the topics we have explored is ‘Money’ we have looked at a range of coins and spoke about the value. We used our imagination and set up a shop where we have some shoppers and shopkeepers. We developed our resilience and chose what coins we would need if we wanted to purchase an item for a certain value. We will continue to explore money in school but also at home with our families!