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Year 2

Staff: Mrs Waring / Mrs Jeffrey / Mrs Graves

Contact info. – emma.waring@panshanger.herts.sch.uk    kathryn.jeffrey@panshanger.herts.sch.uk

Music taught by Mr Mitchell on a Tuesday.

Welcome to Panshanger School and to our Year 2 class. On this page, we post photos every half term sharing updates on the activities and learning the children are completing. 

Spring 2

For World Book Day we enjoyed dressing up as our favourite book characters. We also designed and made sock puppets and created our own puppet shows. We enjoyed performing in our puppet shows and watching each other perform. It was quite tricky to stay hidden while using our own arms to operate the puppet.

In maths we have been busy measuring. We have used different types of rulers and measuring tape to measure items shorter than a metre and longer than a metre. We have also used our measuring skills to do some science investigations. We investigated the statement “Your foot is the same length as the distance from your elbow to your wrist.” We had to make very accurate measurements and compared all our data. We found out that this was true for some people but not everyone.

In computing we have been learning about taking photographs. We have learnt how to take a good photograph, when to use landscape or portrait and experimenting with taking photos in the dark and light. We used our new skills to take some photographs of our sculptures.

We had a special day of learning cricket skills with the coaches from Stevenage Football club. This ended with a sport house team competition. Each team had a turn in bat and everyone else fielded. It was lots of fun and we managed to score lots of runs. Well done to green team who came first.

Spring 1

This term our PE lesson have been about dance and yoga. We have been creating circus characters in dance and thought carefully about how they would move. We put all our ideas together to make a circus dance. In yoga we have been learning about the different poses. We have practised holding our poses and keeping our bodies strong.

In our we have been exploring mixing paint to make secondary and tertiary colours. We also tried adding white to make a tint and black to make a shade. We have also been looking at buildings in art and tried making building collages. Then we used our painting skills to paint pictures of our dream cities.

We have been sharing lots of books and spent some time choosing our favourites. We then wrote about why we like them. It was interesting to see everyone’s choices and hear about their reasons for enjoying them. We are looking forward to share more of our books likes next term.

Autumn 2

In Science we have been learning about keeping healthy. We have explored where foods come from (plants or animals) and which are healthy. We have also tried out different exercises to find out which ones get our hearts beating faster. We also learnt about the scientist Louis Pasteur who discovered how germs spread. This helps us know what we can do to stop germs spreading!

In maths we have been learning about shapes. We have been naming 2D and 3D shapes and describing their properties such as number of faces, sides, edges or vertices. We used the Polygon to build our own 3D shapes. We made cubes, cuboids, triangular prisms and pyramids.

We designed healthy snacks for Santa because he eats too many mince pies. We tasted different fruits and vegetables and decided which ones to use to make a funny face rice cake snack. The best part was tasting them!

Autumn 1

The children have made a great start to their learning in Year 2. This term we have enjoyed sharing stories and poems. In particular we loved drawing story maps and inventing new episodes for the characters in the story. We also wrote a leaflet giving instructions on being a good friend. First we thought about different situations and what we could do to help a friend.

In PE we have been practising lots of skills for playing games. We have been learning to control different types of balls by throwing, rolling and dribbling. We have enjoyed competing in team games and learning to work togther cooperatively.

In our class assemblies, we have been thinking about helping others when they are hurt. We have practiced different first aid skills such as how to help someone if they choke and putting someone in the recovery position.

In art, we have been exploring lines and dots! First, we have looked at artwork by different artists including Yayoi Kusama. Then we explored using different painting tools to create different patterns and textures. Finally, we created our own plant paintings using some of these techniques.

Our science lessons have been all about plants. We learnt about the lifecycles of plants and that some plants grow from seeds and some from bulbs. We planted some seeds and bulbs to see how long they take to grow. We were surprised that the seeds planted in the dark germinated at the same time as the seeds in the light but the seedlings were very yellow. We are still waiting for our bulbs to grow!