Grayling 3’s Blog

The children have settled in really nicely since coming back from the Christmas holidays and have already thrown themselves into their learning!

In maths, we have started learning our two and five times tables. We’ve looked at how we can create groups of objects to help us to understand what multiplication represents.

If you’d like to practise your times tables at home, here are some links to games that children can play:

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/times-tables/coconut-multiples

In literacy, we have been enjoying the traditional tale Lila and the Secret of the Rain. We’ve been creating story maps, retelling the story in class and will soon be retelling the story ourselves.

In Topic, we have started to learn about the polar regions. The children have been learning about the Arctic and Antartica, where these can be found on a map, and information about the animals that live in these areas. We’ve also been reviewing our learning on the continents and the equator.

https://world-geography-games.com/en/world_continents.html

Somehow the end of the Autumn Term is upon us! We’ve been feeling festive this week wearing our Christmas / winter themed outfits on Wednesday and were entertained by our friends in Year 4’s talent show, The Xmas Factor! Yesterday, the children really enjoyed a well-deserved treat making festive Play-Doh!

Thank you for your kind words and messages today; we all wish you a lovely holiday break and enjoyable Christmas if you are celebrating. 

Thank you for sharing the children’s Victorian projects during this term’s home learning challenge. We have been inspired by the children’s knowledge and skills!

In maths, we have concluded adding and subtracting two digit numbers. Here are some examples of addition and subtraction questions without any renaming:

We used base 10 resources to help us when adding and subtracting with renaming.

I hope that you all have a lovely, relaxing Christmas and I am already looking forward to seeing you all next term. Merry Christmas, Grayling 2!

For this week’s home learning, please have a look at the lyrics for our Christmas performance next week! They have been attached to a document in this blog post.

Grayling 2 have done a tremendous job this week in our rehearsals and we cannot wait for you to see us in action next Thursday! Thank you to everyone who has brought in costumes already – please bring these in as soon as possible next week so that we’re all set to go.

Have a lovely weekend all!

Another week has zoomed by in Grayling 2! We very much enjoyed our trip to Shire Hall and learning about a VIctorian child called Harry Parker. We visited the courtroom and cells, made Victorian peg dolls and put our detective hats on to help decide whether or not we thought Harry was guilty. Thank you to the adults who came with us on the trip – your time and support was greatly appreciated.

In maths we have continued using the column method to add one digit and 2 digit numbers. We have talked about ‘renaming’. We add the ‘ones’ first, and sometimes this makes a number more than 10. Here’s an example of how we’ve set it out in our books: 

43 + 8 = 

First, we add the 3 ones and the 8 ones.

This makes 11 (so we’ve renamed the ones and made a new ten). 

Then we add the four tens (from 40) and the one ten (from 11). 

Sometimes we do not need to ‘rename because the ‘ones’ do not add up to make a number that is 10 or more like in this example:

Thank you for all of the sponsors that were sent in today for Children in Need! The children did themselves proud and all walked / ran / skipped one mile around our playground. Have a lovely weekend all and see you on Monday!

This week in Grayling 2, we’ve started our new literacy book Here We Are by Oliver Jeffers, celebrating the diversity of our planet. The children enjoyed thinking about our planet and learning about the solar system. They generated some lovely questions which we will be answering over the next half term!

In maths, we’ve continued to think about addition, using numberlines and column methods to helps us solve simple challenges. 

Thank you so much for sharing the children’s Victorian learning with us so far; the Victorian project will span several weeks so please don’t feel rushed to get something in! We’re looking forward to celebrating the children’s work with them once it’s in. 

In science, we’ve continued thinking about different materials and their properties. The children had a lot of fun creating their own riddles – using the materials and properties that we have learnt about so far – for their classmates to answer. For this week’s home learning, the children are bringing home a challenge that can be adapted, looking at making a boat using tin foil. 

I hope you all have a lovely weekend and look forward to seeing you on Monday!

Miss Hosking

This past half term seems to have flown by but it has been thoroughly enjoyable getting to know and teach all of the lovely children in Grayling 2! Thank you to everyone who joined us for our parent / teacher evenings – it is lovely to hear how settled your children are and how much they are loving the learning in Year 2.

A link is included below to a list of the Year 1 / Year 2 Common Exception Words – if the children are able to practise these at home, this will really help to support their learning at school. The link to an online game which could be played on an iPad / mobile phone is also included. Any additional learning will be sent out after the half term to allow the children the chance to have a well-deserved break over the holidays!

Common Exception Words game: https://www.ictgames.com/littleBirdSpelling/

Last week, we enjoyed a visit from King Kimba, poet and Hip Hop artist. He performed some poetry and rap for the children which they all really loved.

In literacy, we have been writing up our own versions of Baba Yaga. We have focussed on using and editing adjectives to help us describe the characters and the setting. We have learnt the story really well and have started to retell it to our friends using the story maps that we made.

In science, we have been learning about the different materials which can be used to make objects. We have also started to look at the properties of materials such as shiny, rough, smooth, soft, hard, transparent, translucent and opaque. In maths, we have started to practise our addition and have explored this using number lines, part-part whole models, column addition and tens frames.

Here are some links to games that could be used to practise at home:

1 / 10 more / less than: https://www.topmarks.co.uk/learning-to-count/chopper-squad

Addition: https://www.topmarks.co.uk/addition/robot-addition and https://www.topmarks.co.uk/addition/addition-to-10

I hope you all have a wonderful half term and I look forward to seeing you after the holidays!

Miss Hosking

It is the end of another busy week in Year 2!

On Wednesday in Grayling 2, we enjoyed discussing different religions and we found out some special features about Christianity. We recognised lots of words and symbols, such as the cross, and shared the story of The Good Samaritan. We linked this to the theme of kindness and thought about how we can share kindness in class. We all created a kindness rainbow for a friend which the children really enoyed giving and receiving today.

We also enjoyed welcoming adults into our class on Thursday – it was great to see so many of you and to share the children’s brilliant learning! 

We started to learn about traditional tales from other parts of the world this week; we learnt about a story that had been told in parts of Eastern Europe for hundreds of years about a mean witch called Baba Yaga. These pictures may help your child to retell parts of the story:

We’re looking forward to speaking with you during our parent / teacher conferences next week. Please see the links from the school email for booking access on the school cloud system. 

In maths we’ve been learning how to read number patterns and explore missing numbers in a sequence. 

We have to work out if the number sequence is getting larger or smaller. Then we have to look at the numbers given and calculate how much the sequence is changing by. For example, is it going up in 1s, 2s, 5s, 10s or a different number. If you have time you could try these challenges at home: 

Have a lovely weekend Grayling 2 and I’m looking forward to seeing you all on Monday!

It’s the end of another week and somehow the end of September already! 

We have been thinking about traditional tales in literacy and continued using base 10 materials to help show different number bonds. Some of our challenges looked like this: 

The children are bringing their purple homework books home this weekend – as it’s the first one, there are a few extra sheets in their books (don’t worry, we won’t always send as much!)

In the books is a science challenge and a page with some scientific words and definitions. We will be thinking about different materials (like wood, glass, metal, etc.) and the properties they have. That looks like this: 

There is also an overview of the half term sheet which can be found here: http://www.damers.dorset.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/HL-Y2-Aut1-22.pdf 

It looks a bit like this:

 

Next week is ‘Cycle to School Week’. 

You can find out more about the Cycle to school week by clicking the link below: https://www.bikeability.org.uk/cycletoschoolweek/

Over the past week we have been looking at the book ‘The Story Machine’ by Tom McLaughlin. We have really enjoyed exploring the book:

If you would like to listen and share the story at home, you can listen to the author, Tom, read it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXVqCCeCPAU (adults, please check the video first as there may be external comments or enabled links to other videos/ adverts etc.).

In maths we have been partitioning and exploring different ways we can make a two digit number using different resources such as dienes (base 10 blocks made up of tens and ones) to physically form these numbers and partition them to form equations. For example, we explored how the number 64 has 6 tens and 4 ones but we could also partition this number into 4 tens, 2 tens and 4 ones. You could use this website to make your own number using tens and ones:

https://www.coolmath4kids.com/manipulatives/base-ten-blocks 

We’ve also thought of different ways to show numbers, including the part part whole model and place value chart.

Part part whole model.

 

Place value chart.

Parents and carers, we’re looking forward to welcoming you into school for our Meet and Greet session on Tuesday 27th September at 2:30. Please see the newsletter or email from Mrs Smith for full details.

A warm welcome to Year 2! We hope you’ve had an enjoyable, restful and happy summer break. We’re very excited to be welcoming the children into their new Year 2 classes. 

In our first week, we were thinking about bubbles! We described them, wrote poems about them and imagined we had a magic bubble that could take us anywhere we wished! We watched this video to give us some ideas and talked about how the different characters might be feeling too: https://www.literacyshed.com/bubbles.html