Y2 DEERS 2020-2021

Thursday 17th December

We had a very busy but fun last day of term in Deer class designing wrapping paper, making a Christmas gift box from a net and finishing off our Christmas decorations!  And we somehow had time to fit in watching 'The Snowman and the Snowdog' whilst enjoying the snowman marshmallow creations we had made!  We have had a wonderful first term with the class and are already looking forward to the next term of exciting learning ahead with them.  Until then though we would like to wish you all a very happy Christmas and say a huge thank you for all your generous gifts both to us and to the class via the amazon wish list.  They are very much appreciated.

Friday 11th December

We had a very festive day today!  In English, we have been looking at the poem 'T'was the night before Christmas' and today we did our own shadow puppet performance of it!  The children previously carried out an investigation in science to find out which material was most suitable for our puppets.  They all agreed that card would be perfect and it was!  At lunchtime, some children chose to make paper chains to get our classroom looking festive ready for Christmas week.  Some of the children had great fun linking their chains to see how long they could make them!

Friday 4th December

Today the children were very excited to start making their Christmas decorations!  To say that most of them had never sewn before, they did amazingly well and we were so proud of their growth mindset!  You are all going to have a lovely new decoration coming home very soon!

Friday 27th November

This week we learnt about the features of a newspaper report.  Lots of the words we used were new to the children so they all did a great job growing their brains and trying to use the new vocabulary!  Next week, we will be planning and writing our own newspaper reports all about, you've guessed it, the fire of London!  If you have a newspaper in the house over the weekend, perhaps you could look through it with your child and see if they can spot any of the features we learnt about such as headlines, captions, quotes.  We also carried on practising our sewing skills and started designing our tree decorations.  Next week we will start to make them which the children are very excited about!

Friday 21st November

Thank you so much for your support with our diary writing this week!  The children were so excited to show each other their special paper and I could tell from the language they were using that there had been lots of worthwhile discussions going on at home.  It was so lovely to see them all writing with such focus and motivation.  In D.T, we began practising our sewing skills.  This was a brand new skill for most of the children so we were really proud of their efforts and it was wonderful to see the children who had sewn before helping their friends and sharing their skills so kindly.  If your child would like to practise at home before our next lesson, then using the running stitch to join together any bits of old fabric you have at home would be super!  In science, we continued learning about materials and thought about how some objects can be made out of different materials e.g spoons can be made out of wood, plastic or metal.  We also thought about which material would be a bad choice for a spoon and then had a go at eating with a paper spoon which caused much amusement!

Friday 13th November

It has been another busy week of learning in Deer class and we are so proud of how hard the children are working.  The classroom had a very festive feel to it on Friday afternoon in our D.T lesson!  In preparation for making our own Christmas tree decorations, the children practised their cutting skills.  We are also linking our D.T with our science learning by thinking about which materials Christmas decorations are made from and sorting them by their properties.  Perhaps your child could tell you which materials your decorations are made of when you decorate your own tree.  In English, the children wrote their own Fire of London senses poems which they were very proud of.  In maths, we continued our work on subtraction and also worked on our number bonds to 100.  Have a look at what we have been up to in the photos below.  The sea silhouette paintings were produced at the end of last half term but were too beautiful to not share with you!

Tuesday 10th November

In English this week we are learning about poetry. We have been studying a poem all about The Great Fire of London. Today we did some performances of some of the verses. The children brilliantly devised the the performances in groups and them performed them in front of the class. 

Friday 6th November

We really enjoyed practising our ball skills today in P.E!  Now that the weather has turned much colder, please could you ensure that your child has a pair of tracksuit trousers in school, and if your child is wearing tights, please could they have a pair of socks to change into for PE lessons.  

We are learning about the Great Fire of London this term.  Please see the attached link to a fun game the children could play at home and which will aid their learning. We hope they will enjoy it!

fireoflondon.org.uk/game/

Harvest Festival

Click the link below to enjoy our Jordans School Harvest Festival:

Friday 23rd October

As part of our harvest celebrations in school, we found out all about the journey of a banana today!  It created lots of interesting discussions and introduced lots of new vocabulary to the children.  Perhaps you could ask your child if they can remember what the word 'imported' means.  The children were very excited to have a snack with a difference today which tied together our banana theme and our work on 'The Snail and the Whale'!

We have had a fantastic half term with your lovely children.  We are so proud of how hard they have worked and how much they have grown their brains.  We hope you all have a restful break and we look forward to seeing the children after half term for our 'Fire, Fire' topic when we will be learning all about the Great Fire of London.

Wednesday 21st October

To finish off our learning about The Snail and the Whale we watched the film again and really concentrated on listening to the music. We tried to listen to see if the music changed at different points. The children were really good at picking up the the different tempo and loudness of the music to create atmosphere. They then had a go at making rhythms for different parts of the story.

Friday 16th October

This week we have been working hard on our non-fiction writing.  We will add the finishing touches next week!  We have all learnt lots about humpback whales- ask your child to explain to you why they are called 'humpback' whales!

Wednesday 14th October

Today one of our classmates kindly taught the class how to count in Chinese. It was lovely to see the children learning a new skill.

Friday 9th October

The children were so excited to bring their snails home today!  We really hope they made the journey home safely, but if not, we have some beautiful photos to share with you that were taken with the snails all in one piece!  If your child paints their snail at home, please do email us a photo of it.

Tuesday 6th October 2020

Please see below a copy of the parent mail sent to you today.

The children have worked very hard since they have come back to school and we are very impressed with the effort they put in their lessons. As we come to the end of our first block of learning in Maths, there are several areas which the children may benefit from a bit more practise at home. We will be revisiting these areas as the year progresses, so they will get lots more practise at school too.

• Writing the numbers to 100 in numerals and words. The word mat for Place Value (which is on the website in the resources section) can help with this.
• Counting in steps of 2,3,5 and 10 both forwards and backwards to 100, from any number between 0-100. We have been using songs in class to do this and the links are below. If you could really concentrate on counting backwards with them that would be very helpful, as this something they find a little tricky!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wwydguSKOU.   Counting by 2's song

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWxPKnLtnus    Counting by 3's song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_awKlEMyleA       Counting by 5's song

We will begin a new area of learning in Maths next week. This will be all about addition and subtraction. We have uploaded the Maths newsletter to the class page on the website, this explains what we will be learning in school. We have also uploaded a word mat to help you support your child's learning at home. We have attached them to this email as well. 

If you would like to send in any pictures or work the children are doing at home please do so via our class email. We would love to see them.

Please do ask if you have any questions or concerns.

Friday 2nd October

The children have been really enjoying our work based around 'The Snail and the Whale'.  They took their enthusiasm for the story into the playground where many of the children decided to find their own pet snails!

We all grew our brains in art this week when we made clay snails.  Many of the children said they had never used clay before and we were so impressed by how carefully they listened and used their new skills to make super snail models.  We were a very proud bunch of deer by home-time!  Ask the children to explain to you how they joined different pieces of clay together.  We will be keeping our snails in class for a few days and then they will be slithering their way back to join your families!  If your child chooses to paint their snail at home, we would love to see a picture so please do email them to the class email address.   

Monday 28th September

Today in Topic, we played a board game all about Christopher Columbus. The children had to decide if a fact was true or false and  if they got it correct they had to move round the board. Everyone really enjoyed the game and I was very impressed with their knowledge!

Wednesday 23rd September

In English we wrote postcards as if we were the snail in the book, The Snail and the Whale. We then read them out to our classmates in our snail hats!

Friday 18th September

We are only a few weeks into the term and already the children have created some fantastic pieces of art that we wanted to share with you!