Year 2

World Book Day - Croc and Bird

Our work for World Book Day has been focused on the wonderful story Croc and Bird by Alexis Deacon. It tells the story of Croc and Bird who hatch next to each other and think they are brothers. They later realise they are not brothers but their bond is too strong to be broken.

After reading the story and talking about the characters feelings and emotions and how they get on together, we wrote a letter as Croc or Bird to explore how we felt when we returned to our animal's family. The children had to stretch their Empathy muscle to write as one of the characters and describe what their life was like now as well as expressing their feelings.

Our art activity, focused on us stretching our imaginations. We had to choose an animal, look carefully at their patterns and colours and design the egg that they might hatch out of. The children came up with some fantastic designs!

The Great Fire of London

This half term Year 2 have learnt all about The Great Fire of London as part of our topic 'London'. As part of this we read the story 'Toby and The Great Fire' and learnt that in order to try and stop the spread of the fire that people pulled down houses in order to create a fire break. We also learn that the houses burnt so readily because they were made of wood and had thatched roofs, whereas modern houses today are built mainly out of bricks and have have tiled roofs. We created our own houses and added cotton wool to the roof to mimic the thatching and then recreated the Great Fire both with and without a fire break to see what effect it would have. We found out that the firs stopped at the point of a fire break and couldn't spread any further but when the houses were all connected that the fire spread rapidly. We concluded that it would be unlikely that a fire of that magnitude would break out in modern day London due to the materials that we use to construct houses and the fire brigade that we have.

If love was...

In assembly this week we learnt about Holocaust Memorial Day and why people remember it today. We learnt about the terms 'discrimination' and 'persecution' and flexed our empathy and listening learning muscles to imagine how others felt. We then read a poem about love and hate and the different feelings and colours associated with each emotion. From this we created our own poems about what love means to us. Have a read of some of them below as we're very proud of them.

Split Pin Puppets

This half term we have learnt all about toys. As part of this we explored how split pin puppets work. We then practised the skills of cutting and pinning when we used a pre-made template of a split pin animal puppet. We then moved on to designing our own, testing our ideas using a prototype before finally creating and evaluating our own split pin puppets. We linked our puppet making to our text in English 'The Adventures of Egg Box Dragon' by creating a friend for our favourite dragon.

Stick Man at The Den

In Year 2 we listened to the story of Stick Man by Julia Donaldson. In the story people confused poor Stick Man with an actual stick, which he he was not very happy about. We went over to The Den and with the help of Stick Man we learned how to tell the difference between a stick and a Stick Man. We then carried out a range of different activities linking to the story such as making wands out of sticks, making nests for birds using sticks and using sticks for poles in sand castles. We really flexed our noticing and collaboration learning muscles while we were over there and had a lovely morning.