Year Two - Rowan and Maple
Summer 1
This half term we completed our ‘Special Agent Tests’, otherwise known as SAT’s and our teachers were pleased that we handled them with maturity, independence and resilience.
We have also celebrated the King’s coronation and we learnt a coronation song to sing to our adults. We made lots of lovely things to celebrate such as crowns, flags, coins, stamps and presented it in a special keepsake booklet.
Other highlights included creating some Willow Tree pattern art and writing explanation texts about our own Monstermatic Toy Company monster.
Spring 2
We have gone all regal learning about Kings and Queens of the past, whilst reflecting on the new King, Charles III.
In English, we learnt all about Africa using a beautiful core text and explored features of non-fiction texts. We have also begun looking at a story with repetitive language, ‘On the Way Home’ by Jill Murphy.
In Maths, we focused on multiplication and division, so we now know strategies to solve calculations for all four operations. This should help us in May when we sit our KS1 SATs.
In Music, we unpicked a piece of music about a river, ‘Orawa’ by Wojciech Kilar and compared it to other songs or compositions about rivers, thinking about the musical journey as it meandered through countryside.
Finally, in RE, we learnt about the Easter story and the journey that Jesus had to endure during Holy Week, as he was arrested, crucified and then rose again on Easter morning.
Spring 1
Some super learning this half term in both classes, learning all about Kenya in Geography and creating some African Art.
In English, we have written our own poems based on the Into the Blue poem by Hilda Offen. These used many different descriptive techniques including similes, metaphors, alliteration, onomatopoeia and personification.
Grandma Rap in Music was fun and we learnt about the rule of three when becoming photographers in Computing.
Autumn 2
The Great Fire of London was our topic this half term and we have enjoyed writing about it and creating some colourful art collages and designing buildings to show how styles of houses have changed over time.
In music, we learnt all about a piece of music called 'Carnival of the Animals by the composer Saint-Saens. You may recognise a clip below entitled 'Aquarium'.
‘A Holly Jolly Christmas’ was enjoyed by parents and children alike. We learnt some new songs and acted out our KS1 Christmas performance.
In English, we wrote acrostic poems about Winter or Christmas.
Here is one by Hafsa in 2 Rowan.
Cookies fresh from the oven,
Having fun decorating the tree,
Rapping the gifts for your loved ones to open (sp.)
Ice outside, be careful on the roads.
Santa's milk and carrots for the reindeer left on the plate,
Time to spend with family and friends,
Making a gingerbread house to enjoy with everyone,
And don't forget to hang the stocking...
Santa is coming down the chimney tonight!
Finally, we enjoyed ‘Deco Day’, making a calendar, Christmas card, party hat (for the Christmas lunch that day) and a tree decoration.
Autumn 1
Year 2 enjoyed their first half term. As the photos below show, we experimented with colour in Art when replicating artists such as Constable, Bowling and Kandinsky. Computing was fun as we got to create a sequence of instructions using Scratch programming which saw us become astronauts, guiding a rocket from planet to planet. We learnt about life cycles of animals and humans in Science. In PE, we had a local cricket coach come in from Rising Stars to help us with our throwing, catching and fielding skills. We explored the differences between towns and countryside in Geography.
We are looking forward to our trip to the Barbican on the first week back to see the London Symphony Orchestra. It should be an amazing experience.