Celebrating Autumn Term 2!
We have achieved so much academically, socially and emotionally over the last term, guided by the whole school focus of compassion, under continued challenging conditions. 
We embraced a full curriculum through our pirate topic from creative writing, letter writing, to even writing instructions for making a ‘Jolly Roger Jam Sandwich’. We quickly learnt the importance of clear and concise instructions after our first attempt resulted in jam being spread on a table with a hand and a whole tub of butter being sandwiched between two slices of bread!
Continuing our pirate theme, we explored grid references through treasure maps and looked at the different countries and continents that pirates explored before concluding our topic with a ‘Pirate Day,’ with activities ranging from a treasure hunt, biscuit decorating to clay coin making!
Our maths this term focussed on addition and subtraction and saw us master the formal column methods as well as applying the concepts to real life problem solving.
In the photos below, you will see we fully embraced the Autumnal weather when studying weather and the different seasons.  We have installed our rain gauges, taken our first set of readings and are looking forward to future seasons to see if our rainfall predictions are correct.  We took our inspiration from our Autumnal walk for our art focus where we explored the colour wheel, mixing paint and associating colours with the seasons. 
Christmas festivities provided the backdrop for more creative art and design techniques culminating in a Christmas art and craft day where we had the opportunity to practice skills including, folding, attaching, cutting and printing.
We were extremely thankful to be able to perform our musical nativity of ‘Lights, Camel, Action’ to a live (socially distanced!)  audience.  We had so many lines to learn, songs to sing and moves to perfect – each and every one of us rose to the occasion and it proved to be a nativity that will not be forgotten and a fantastic end to a busy term.

Looking forward to next term.
‘Once upon a time’ is our topic for next term where we are looking forward to exploring fairy tales – are they all as we thought?  Could there be twists, turns and alternative endings that we have not considered before?  Perhaps the ‘big bad wolf’ was just misunderstood.  Were the ‘three little pigs’ as kind as they could have been?
The term promises to be an interesting one as we explore settings for fairy tales in different parts of the world – if you wrote a fairy tale where would you base it?  We will also be getting to grips with money, multiplication and division plus exploring what animals need to survive and thrive.

Celebrating our first half term.

We settled very quickly into the new routines of Year 2, demonstrating how we make sure that we are ready to learn, ready to try our best  and ready to work together to look after each other.

We loved out pirate topic, from researching real-life pirates from the past, to using a variety of different texts to produce some excellent recounts, fact files, top trumps, diary entries, wanted posters and even a message in a bottle!  We have demonstrated how we can up level our writing using  various literary devices and considered how we can present our work. 

We linked our science topic, the studying of everyday materials, to our pirate work by exploring properties of different materials, classification and conducting an investigation into which material would be best to build a pirate ship from and why!  All of which required us to apply our learning and ensure that our investigation was ‘fair’.  We enjoyed learning new vocabulary and testing our predictions.

RE saw us learning what the Bible teaches us about kindness and we were fortunate enough to welcome a Christian Youth Group Leader into out class to speak to us about her experiences.  She was very impressed with our questions and we certainly enjoyed the kindness challenge she set us involving sweets!

In our maths work we have spent time embedding and expanding our understanding of place value and have started to develop our reasoning and problem-solving skills. The use of an online maths programme has meant that maths homework has been more enjoyable, with a fantastic number of us achieving bronze and silver certificates for our maths work.

Each week has been full of activities - in addition to the above, we have had a great time learning pirate sea shanties, our PE sessions have seen us build up to our own circuit training activity involving multiple stations demonstrating new skills,  in art we have explored different types of printing, in computing we have looked at internet safety and how we can all stay safe online whilst in PSHE we have explore what it is like ‘being me in my world’.

Our term concluded with us leading a harvest festival prayer in our local church as part of our school service and a very exciting and informative trip to Portsmouth Historic Dockyard to visit HMS Victory.  We explored the ship investigating different materials used in its construction and investigating what life would have been like onboard.  We were able to engage in a number of activities from, trying on clothes to identifying mystery objects.  It was a truly memorable day.