Snowy Owls
We have had a lovely half term learning all about food and where it comes from. We began the topic by reading “The World Came to My Place Today” and we spread out a world map and placed different foods such as tea, chocolate, bananas and rice across the map. We wrote our own sentences about the different foods and where they come from.
We then moved on to following instructions and we had a floury afternoon making soda bread! Miss Poole made the bread mix and then the children all got to knead the bread. We talked about how the ingredients mixed together change through the baking process. All the children tried a soda bread roll and there were mixed reviews!
The children enjoyed taste testing different fruits such as kiwi fruit and blueberry. They thought of appropriate, adventurous adjectives to describe how the fruit looks, tastes, feels, and smells. We also really loved coming up with our dream dessert recipes. There was a lot of ice cream and chocolate! The children did well to use different imperative verbs for example swirl, drizzle and mix.
We have done lots of dividing and multiplying this half term and food was a very handy topic! We also learned how to recognise and write fractions of halves, quarters and thirds.
We made pizzas out of collage materials and these look great on display. We finished our term by enjoying a fantastic story called “Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast” by Josh Funk and we based our Golden Writing on this story of food coming to life inside a fridge, with some exciting results!
The Snowy Owls have had a very fun, busy and “out-of-this-world” half term! We loved learning about Space. We started by exploring a non-fiction book which asked a lot of questions – so we came up with our own questions too. We found out about what it is like to be an astronaut. We experienced our very own Snowy Owl mission to space. We tried writing underneath the tables to find out how tricky it is to write at a strange angle. We also made and tasted ‘Astronaut Pudding’ which was a hit!
We read “The Way back Home” by one of our favourite authors Oliver Jeffers. It is a great story and we enjoyed thinking about how the characters feel throughout the story. We also worked together to come up with some ways to continue the story.
We learned about Neil Armstrong and his mission to the moon, and we loved hearing the special words he is famous for saying. We also enjoyed exploring a virtual model of the planets. We worked very hard together to make our own papier mache model of the planets along with the sun.
Finally, the class worked extremely hard on the Christmas Play and they thoroughly enjoyed taking part. It was a brilliant way to end a very exciting term!
We have had a lovely second half term in the Snowy Owls. Our mini topic this half term (connected to our big term topic called ‘Animal Planet’) has been about pandas. We have loved finding out lots about these amazing animals. Did you know a panda likes eats 22 pounds of bamboo a day?
We enjoyed finding out lots of facts about pandas in the National Geographic Kids book about pandas.
We then loved reading the story ‘Little Panda’ by Renata Liwska. We had to make our own story predictions and we enjoyed finding out the real ending afterwards! We wrote fantastic stories based on ‘Little Panda’, borrowing some brilliant adjectives from the book.
To create our display of pandas in the bamboo forests, we had to tear paper very very carefully to make the right shaped body and arms and legs of the panda. This was tricky at times!
We also spent time finding out about where pandas live…China! We found China on the map and found out about the country.
This half term has been extremely busy but fun for the Snowy Owls! Our topic has been “Antarctica” and we have learnt all about Emperor penguins who live there. We started by finding out what happens to an Emperor penguin’s egg when we read “Emperor’s Egg” by Martin Jenkins. We also found out how an Emperor penguin survives in the coldest place on the planet.
We imagined we went on a trip to Antarctica and we thought about what we would pack for our visit to the continent. We wrote a postcard to send back home to England, pretending we were on our trip, explaining what we had seen and what we thought of our trip.
We also LOVED reading “Lost and Found” by Oliver Jeffers which is about a penguin who arrives on a boy’s doorstep in England. The story follows the penguin and the boy as they travel back to Antarctica together on a row boat. We learnt the story off by heart using actions and time connectives to help us. This was very fun, especially when we acted it out using our penguin puppets we made! Each Snowy Owl has written their own version of the story where a lion arrives on a boy’s doorstep!
The children have also been practicing programming Beebots to follow letters and numbers!
The Year 2s had a very busy half term learning a dance to perform at the Hethersett Cluster Show on the theme the “World of Cultures”. We danced to “We are One” which was the football world cup 2014 song. They performed this brilliantly in front of 200 other Year 2 children in the cluster, and they should be very proud of themselves for taking part! We also completed some Art work as part of this celebration which is displayed in our school.
The Snowy Owls have had a very busy beginning to the school year. This half term the topic has been “Families” and we have thought about what makes a family, where we live and how we know we belong. We practised drawing a partner and then used a mirror to draw and colour our very own self-portraits which look great on our classroom wall!
We have loved reading all the “Large Family” stories written by Jill Murphy, especially “Five Minutes’ Peace” which we liked acting out – even Miss Poole transformed into Mrs Large and we interviewed her! We are busy finishing off writing our own stories based on the Large Family and we have enjoyed plotting what might happen next to the family.
Snowy Owls have also been very excited to design and make their own pop-up puppets. We can’t wait to finish them and play with them.
This half term we have learnt lots about the Victorians. We started our topic with a fantastic, interesting and fun visit to Gressenhall Museum where we learnt all about how Victorians did the cooking, cleaning and washing without electricity! We had to help them prepare for the Vicar coming round for afternoon tea so there was lots of work to do. This helped us to really imagine what life in the Victorian times was like.
We have worked extremely hard on writing our stories where the Queen wrote to us to explain she was coming to visit the school so the characters had to make sure the school was ready for the Queen! We have more recently been writing stories set in a Victorian school which has given us many chances to compare life in a Victorian school to life in our school nowadays.
Year 2 also had an amazing opportunity to perform a dance in front of our cluster of schools (Hethersett, Cringleford and Mulbarton) which was all linked to the Olympic Legacy. The children performed their dance to “Roar” by Katy Perry and showed how through working really hard and trying our best we can achieve great things.
The children also did some brilliant art work with Phil Daniels, a visiting artist. He showed the children how to use charcoal to portray emotions such as determination and joy from winning a gold medal. The children got covered in charcoal but loved this amazing experience!
