We have been having lots of fun in Year Two this half term. Our ‘book as a hook’ has been Dougal’s Deep-Sea Diary by Simon Bartram’. We have acted in role, interviewing Dougal about his interesting find; used Kung-Fu punctuation to help us provide quotes in our newspaper article; and (amongst lots of other things) learnt how to use co-ordinating and subordinating conjunctions. When it came to the point where Dougal was debating returning to his job on land Vs staying in Atlantis, we discussed the reasons for and against him leaving and acted out a conscience alley offering advice. We have also received a letter from Bob, Dougal’s cousin, asking for help in finding Dougal. The children successfully wrote in first and third person when sending a reply. We are waiting to hear back from Bob…
In Science we have been studying Animals and Living Things. We have had a visit from a friendly tortoise and some chicks and used this to lead us into learning about animal adaptations and life cycles. In one lesson, we became stranded on a desert island and had to write a message in a bottle to passing ships to let them know of our current welfare and what supplies we would need in order to cater to our basic needs. In one of our science lessons, we became slinky linky snakes, linking our learning to that which we were doing in English. We designed a healthy lunch for Bob, the Man on the Moon and his friends, discussing why each element of the feast was important as part of a healthy, balanced diet.
In maths, we have been recapping lots of basic skills: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and fractions of both shape and amount. The children have been working with concrete apparatus to help them with these concepts before moving on to pictorial representations. In one exciting lesson, the children represented fractions in lots of different ways and together, we created a ‘Fraction Museum’! The children thoroughly enjoyed visiting the various exhibitions to see what fractions they could spot. We have been working really hard on our problem solving skills, and the children are becoming more confident with explaining their reasoning as well.
Continuing with our under water theme, in Topic we learnt about Grace Darling. We became archaeologists, digging for clues about who we would be learning about this half term. The children put puzzle pieces together to form a portrait, and inferred what the different clues told us about this important figure from the past. We explore primary and secondary sources to find out more and discussed the authenticity of where we were getting the information from.
What a busy and successful half term! Well done Year Two.
