Welcome to Deer Class- Year 2!

Dancing Raisins!

This week, we started our work on instructions by following written instructions to carry out a science experiment.  Ask your child if they can explain to you what happened and why the raisins looked like they were dancing!

Making boats for the snail!

We all thoroughly enjoyed making boats for the snail to go exploring on...and we learnt lots along the way too!  We were so excited to test out our boats and there were lots of big smiles when the boats floated!

Friday 7th February

This week we investigated floating and sinking.  We made predictions about the objects we were testing and then tried each one on water to discover their buoyancy.  We had some really interesting discussions about what we saw.  We had a tricky problem to solve with a ball of blu-tac- was it possible to change the shape to make it float?  We discovered that it was and learnt that it is not just an object's weight but also its shape which helps it to float.

We also started designing our boats for the snail and it was great to see the children applying their learning from our science lessons.

Thursday 30th January

This week we received a special message from the snail who wants us to build him a boat for his next adventure! In science, we tested several materials to find out if they are waterproof or absorbent.  Next week, we are going to carry out an investigation into floating and sinking before designing and making our boats.

Friday 17th January

In art, we looked at 'The Snail' by Henri Matisse.  The children tried to guess what it was a picture of and their ideas included a pirate with a beard, a dog, a snake and a flower.  They then created their own sea creature pictures using the same 'cut-out' technique.  As always, the children amazed me with how imaginative and different all their creations were!  

Thursday 19th December

We had a brilliant last term day of term together today!  First, we shared our habitats that we have been so busy making over the last few weeks.  The children were so proud of their efforts and learnt so many new things about their animals (as did the grown-ups in Deer class!)  They all loved sharing their work and looking at their friends achievements too.

Then we had our class treat for filling up the pompom jar- a Christmas film and an ice lolly- which everyone thoroughly enjoyed!

We hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and look forward to more fun learning in the Spring term.

Friday 13th December

We have really enjoyed our P.E sessions this half term where the focus has been target games.  We particularly liked the curling and bowling!

Friday 29th November

This week we have been very busy practising our Christmas play which we are very excited to share with you soon!  However, we have still found time to fit in lots of other fun activities such as watching the performance of Snow White which we all really enjoyed and making a start on our shoebox habitats.  We are all looking forward to continuing with them next week.

Friday 22nd November

After learning about the Diwali story of 'Rama and Sita', we had lots of fun designing and making a shadow puppet of one of the characters from the story.  We used our learning from our work in science to decide which materials to make our puppets out of.  We loved trying out our puppets and were very pleased with the results!

Friday 8th November

This week went off with a bang as we learnt all about Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, wrote firework poems and created fantastic firework art!

Friday 11th October

Today we started our work on 2D shapes.  After learning how to count the sides of a 2D shape accurately and using that information to work out its name, we investigated how many of each shape we could make using 18 lollipop sticks!  Some of us had a go at stretching elastic bands on a geoboard to make shapes on the laptops.

Friday 4th October

We had a lovely afternoon today completing our monochrome paintings.  Last week, the children applied their learning about making colours lighter/darker to paint their background.  This week, they added a silhouette to complete their scene.  All of the children took great care over their painting and were very proud of the results.  They look fantastic on display in our room! 

What a busy and fun start to the year we have had!  The new deer have settled in brilliantly and we have already learnt so much.  As part of our topic about light, we have been finding out about how plants grow with and without light.  Toffee the dog wants to grow plants in his kennel but it hasn't been very successful!  The children guessed that it might be because it was dark in his kennel so we set up an experiment to find out.  We tried growing cress inside and outside his kennel and watched to see what happened.  Lots of the children thought that the cress seeds in the kennel would not grow so we had lots of surprised faces when we opened the doors and saw the results!  Have a look at the picture of our results below- perhaps your child could tell you which ones grew in the dark and which ones grew in the light!  Our next job is to work out a solution for Toffee.  We had lots of great ideas from the children including cutting a window in his kennel!  We are going to find out if plants will grow well with torchlight as some of the children suggested putting a light in his kennel.  Watch this space to see what we find out!