Living and Learning: strong emotions and feelings
This half term, in Living and Learning with Mrs Bald, we are thinking about emotions and friendships.
We’ve thought about how it feels to be happy, excited, nervous or sad and when we might experience these different emotions. We thought about how our bodies react to our emotions. For example, if we are happy then we will laugh and smile. If we are sad or worried, then we might feel knots in our tummies or we might need to cry. We know that it is okay to experience different emotions and that other people do, too.
We’ve thought about different ways that we could comfort people, and ourselves, if there are feelings of sadness. One example was mindfulness exercises, such as listening to calming music or colouring in. We also thought about what we would say to someone who felt sad and discussed this in one of our circle time sessions.
Another area that we’ve thought about is the idea of friendships. We know that sometimes our friends can make us happy and sometimes we can also be sad because of friendships. Our Christian value this half term is forgiveness so we’ve thought about how we can ask for someone to forgive us or to show forgiveness if a friendship has made us sad.
World Book Day!
Today, we celebrated World Book Day in Year 2! We reflected on our talk time homework and brought in our favourite books to share. We discussed why we like our books and how important it is to read.
“Reading helps our mental health by relaxing.”
“Reading more helps us become fluent readers.”
“Reading is fun to do with our family and friends.”
“Reading can help us with our learning”
Take a look at our favourite books – there’s a range! Chapter books, picture books, fiction books, non fiction books, books about animals, books about maths….
We joined up with our Year 4 friends to read and share our favourite books. Help at home by reading each night before bed to build up fluency. Talk about the order of events in your book or about new words you’ve learned.
World Book Day
What a wonderful day we have had celebrating reading. We have enjoyed sharing our books with each other and listening to a few stories and books being read aloud by different adults in school.
This morning, we had a surprise visit from Miss Gledhill who read Ping and this afternoon Year 5 and 6 came to our classroom to share stories with us too.
What have we been learning about in Year 2?
There’s been some fantastic learning happening in class recently. We wanted to share some of it with you…
Reading: learning to use a dictionary!
We’ve recently been exploring a poem called The Three Little Kittens by Eliza Lee Follen in our reading lessons – you may have seen this on our homework sheet! There were some new vocabulary words that we weren’t sure about, so we used a dictionary to help us learn the definitions of sigh, fear and soil. We know that dictionaries can help us spell words and look up meanings of words we are curious about. We use our knowledge of the alphabet when looking for words in dictionaries.
Maths: doubling numbers!
We’ve been making fantastic progress with our multiplication and division learning in Maths. We’ve recently learned to multiply and divide by 2. Our knowledge of the 2x tables helps us with doubling numbers. We used Numicon and mirrors to help us with our doubling learning!
Computer Coding
Today, the children explored a digital game called Scratch. They created a sprite (a 2D character) and used the coding blocks to form an algorithm. The children enjoyed creating, coding and testing their ideas.
What is Scratch programming?
Scratch is a programme aimed at supporting children developing their coding and programming skills. It can be used to create stories, games and animations. Scratch promotes computational thinking and problem solving skills.
Have a go at home – it’s free!
Zooming Julia Donaldson
To kick off world book day, we enjoyed a zoom with Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. We enjoyed a story about a hare and a hedgehog who were in a running race. Axel Scheffler showed us how he draws the characters. Julia Donaldson then read us a new story about some baddies. The children were gripped!
Food Technology
This week, we have made some overnight oats.
We washed our hands before we started to wash away any germs. We read the recipe and worked together in pairs to follow the method. We used a claw grip to keep us safe when cutting the banana with a knife.
After, we evaluated our oats saying what we enjoyed and what we’d improve if we made them again.
If you make this at home, please email some pictures to share with us.
Working Scientifically… and investigating nappies!
This half term, we will be working scientifically using our 5 enquiry types.
This week, we observed nappies to help us with our investigation. We thought about the properties of a nappy and what it’s function is. The children had some great ideas and many recognised a nappy need to be soft to protect the skin, stretchy and it needs to absorb liquid.
Check out the key vocabulary for our new topic and help at home by discussing these words with your child. 
All aboard for a new term
I hope you all had a fantastic half term break and are ready to enjoy our new topic ‘let’s go’. This week our focus story was ‘The train ride’ we had lots of different transport activities in our provision areas. We really enjoyed learning more about what trains were like long ago and what they are like today.
We are very excited as we think we have started to spot the first signs of Spring. We have been looking carefully on our journeys and Arthur painted a beautiful daffodil that he had seen on his way to school.
We have been using our phonics skills to build words and sentences. We really enjoyed finding the sound balls and making a word.
Poetry Picnic
We have been popping crazy with our poem this week. We hope you enjoy it too.
On Thursday 2 March it is World Book Day. This year we are not dressing up however we would like invite all families into class to share a story together. Please could you bring a favourite story and teddy with you on Thursday morning.
Mrs Payne
Jaspers beanstalk
This week in nursery our focus book has been Jaspers Beanstalk. The children really enjoyed listening and joining in with the story.
‘he isn’t happy his bean hasn’t grown’
‘he needs to get all the slugs off so that it doesn’t get eaten’
‘he wants to climb the beanstalk to go find a giant like Jack did’
We planted our own beans to what them grow!
We started to explore what we might need to help seeds grow…
‘we need some mud to put the seed in’
‘ the water helps make it grow’
Polite notice
Next week we will be drawing our faces. If you could bring in a photo of your child when they were a baby so we can compare how we have changed!
Have a lovely weekend!
Miss Ward