What a wonderful start to Year 2 we have had! The children have settled in so well and are ready to go!
We started the year thinking about our saint, St James, and taking time to think deeply about what our mission statement, ‘Together we are learning to follow Jesus,’ means. We wrote wonderful prayers asking Jesus to help us in the coming academic year.
In RE lessons we have learnt about Chosen People and Mysteries, following The Way, The Truth and The Life topics. We have learnt the Bible stories about Abraham, Moses, and Daniel and the lion’s den. We understand that we have been chosen by God and we put our trust in God. We have learnt about the mystery of the Holy Trinity and prepared for the birth of Jesus during Advent. Our Nativity performance was amazing! We have really enjoyed getting ready for Christmas in Class 2 and have had lots of special Prayer Time sessions around our Advent wreath.
We have also really enjoyed helping to plan and prepare Prayer Time sessions each week throughout the term.
We celebrated a wonderful mass planned by the children on the theme of saying ‘Thank you to God’. They wrote their own introduction, Penitential Rites and Bidding prayers and helped choose the readings. They delivered it beautifully in church and even sang their bidding prayers, well done!
This term we have been learning all about the geography and history of the UK, and preparing dishes from all four nations! The children made Welsh Cakes, English stew and dumplings, Scottish neeps and tatties and Northern Irish soda bread. They practised the important skills of peeling, chopping, weighing, rubbing in, rolling, cutting and frying. It was a wonderful feast!
We have been continuing to learn how to read using the Read, Write, Inc. scheme of work, and working collaboratively in maths, following Maths, No Problem! This term we have learnt to use numbers to 100, improve our addition and subtraction, as well as learning about mass and length.
We have really enjoyed using some new exciting books as our focus in English, following Pathways to Write. We wrote a fantastic story focussing on character description and conjunctions after reading Troll Swap by Leigh Hodgkinson. We have loved learning all about owls, using The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark by Jill Tomlinson to inspire us. After Christmas we will write non-chronological reports about owls using conjunctions and commas!
We had a very special English lesson when we took part in a Puffin Virtual Visit, and joined thousands of other children to have a lesson lead by the author Pippa Goodhart and the illustrator Nick Sharratt! It was to launch their new book, You Choose Christmas, and we got to learn to draw like Nick!
In science we have been learning all about Living Things and their Habitats. We have loved learning about different habitats and food chains, and practising our enquiry skills exploring in our local habitat!
The children have amazed us with their coding skills in computing and have also learnt how to stay safe online. In RSE we have thought about our communities and how we are all unique. We have continued to follow Charanga for our music and on Tuesday in PE we have improved our ball and movement skills.
We have really enjoyed personalising our own sketchbooks and using nature to inspire us in our Explore and Draw topic in Access Art. We loved creating sculptures outside, and the quality of the creations was amazing, especially those inspired by Jesus on the cross. We then took nature inside and practised our line drawing using continuous line drawing and blind drawing techniques!
Thank you for all your hard work completing this term’s homework project all about the UK! We have had paintings, models, information booklets and even an Advent calendar, and the effort that has gone into them all has been fantastic, well done everybody! We have loved seeing the range of different ideas and how creative you have been! We hope you enjoyed creating these together at home. Here they are:
