23rd Jan '26
Another week has flown by. We can't believe we are half way through the term! The children are definitely "living life in all its fullness". Despite the wet weather this week, the children have managed to remain focussed and have produced some lovely pieces of work.
In Literacy Year 2 planned and wrote a setting description to go with the book "Lila and the Secret of Rain". After a lot of work on adjectives, expanded noun phrases and suffixes (-ing, -er and est on the end of a word) the children wrote some lovely pieces. Phrases such as "For weeks and weeks the sun had been burning down on the village..." were evident in their writing. They should be very proud of the work that they produced.
Year 2 have also tried hard using their spelling contractions in their writing such as can't, didn't, hadn't and couldn't. This has been a focus this week in their spelling lessons. They have learnt that two words go together to make one word and that the apostrophe replaces one or two letters. This makes the word easier to read. They have also been thinking about "le" at the end of a word. For example, apple.
In maths, Year 2 have moved on to adding and subtracting tens from a two digit number and then they have learnt how to add a 2-digit number to a 2-digit number, not crossing a ten. For example 25 + 13 or 46 + 53. They have used tens and ones grids to support with this. They have learnt to add the ones first and then the tens. They can then find out the total. If they had 35 + 12, the five ones plus two ones is seven ones. Three tens plus one ten is four tens. So four tens, plus seven ones is forty-seven, so 35 + 12 = 47.
In science, the children have continued to think about life cycles. Our focus was one the human life cycle this week. The children completed diagrams of the human life cycle and then they had to think about what you can do at different stages of the human life cycle. The children completed a venn diagram. They learnt that we need to drink at all stages of the life cycle, we eat different things as we grow up compared with when we were a baby. We learn to walk, talk and as we become an adult we can do even more things.
In art, the children used their skills of shading and showing texture by using only a drawing pencil. They had to do still life drawings of some daffodils and a musical instrument. The focus for the daffodils was shading as the stems were lighter at the bottom compared to the top of the stem. The centre of the daffodil was also a different shade to the petals. With the musical instruments, the focus was on texture, showing that these instruments were "bumpy" (instruments that you scrape to get a sound) or were made of wood. All children drew both objects. They really put some effort into using their observational skills.
This week Kingfishers have enjoyed sharing their library books at home and at the end of the week got the opportunity to write their own book reviews about the book that they took home or our reading books. Here are just a few of our book recommendations from this week!
"I loved this book! It was a rescue book so really exciting!"
"I loved reading a book about football, especially as there were girls playing football"
"I really liked it but it was a bit scary!"
"I love animals, this book has lots of information about ducks!"
This week we even finish our new class read book written by Michael Rosen!
She wanted a dog but instead she got a fish and not just any fish, but we'll let your our Kingfishers fill you and review the book for us and we simply loved this book!
Next week we will be getting our reading blankets out, putting our fairy lights on and starting a whole new class reading.
Coming soon is our very own reading tree to Kingfishers so watch this space for exciting updates!
We also voted for our next class read, which will be.....
In our reading session this week we explored a non chronological report about The Great Fire of London, which Kingfishers were extremely pleased about as we had previously learnt about this is History! This week we separated the report into 4 sections as we were sitting at 4 tables and each table read a section of the report each, with every child working extremely hard to read alongside each other.
As we read each paragraph we stopped and discussed new vocabulary, such as;
blaze
extinguished
belongings
We focused on discussing the vocabulary and then used paired talk to discuss why the author had chosen particular words within the texts, discussing the effect that these words have.
For example- The used of blaze, gives the feeling of the fire being extremely hot and taking over the houses. We discussed that this is a more powerful word than using a word such as flames.
The fire spread quickly as the blaze took over the buildings.
We talked about how the people in London would have felt during the fire and why they used the River Thames as a way of escaping the fire.
Within our Phonics this week we have been working really hard to put everything that we have been learning within our Phonics sessions into our writing and it has been lovely to see how hard all our children are working to use different strategies to support them.
We even learnt a rap in class this week to help us learn the rules for adding -er to the end of words!
As we continued to develop Tag Rugby skills, this week we were reintroduced to 'Protect the base' as our warm up! It was the perfect game to practice our listening, team work and spatial awareness skills!
As we started taking the 'treasure' from each others base we also had to avoid the defender from taking our tag!
It was a very close game!
We then went into teams of 3 and started practicing getting up from the floor with the rugby ball- who could get up the quickest?
We ended the week with RE and the following question.....
What is meant by a miracle?
Firstly we watched a video that showed us how to make pepper move in water! Why not have a go at it at home?
- Put a small amount of water in the shallow plate
- Pour some ground pepper into the water
- Put your finger in the middle- What happens?
- Now add a small amount of washing up liquid to the water.
- Put your finger in the middle- What happens?
We discussed magic and miracles and then read The Calming of the storm discussing if it was a magic trick or a miracle.
We discussed how a miracle was something that was beyond explanation, whereas a magic trick could be learnt, it could be explained. Most of Year 1 and Year 2 felt that the Calming of the storm showed a miracle because...
"One person can't stop a storm!"
"We don't know how Jesus was able to stop the rain and the wind"
"Jesus was a miracle from God so it must be a miracle that he could stop the storm"
Are there times when you have experienced magic tricks or miracles? How have they made you feel?
As we come to the end of a rather wet week we hope that the rain will start to calm for us and we will see some dry weather next week! Have a wonderful weekend, we can't wait to hear about how you have been "Living life in all it's fullness"