Hello my lovelies, I hope that you enjoyed your weekend?

On Saturday I found it tricky not to keep checking my 2emails but told myself that I would save that treat for this morning!I am delighted to say that I have five new 2email messages and I will be replying to you soon, so have a check later.

Discovering new ways to stay in touch with friends and family has been interesting and eye-opening over the last week. I have taught my parents and how to video-call and they can just about manage it now so that I can see their whole face and not just an ear or eyebrow. Each evening at dinnertime, we have been entertained by a family member who lives by the seaside giving a flute recital on Facebook, complete with backing tracks, costumes and commentary. I have had a cook-along with a friend and managed to have a mini online party on Saturday evening with our nextdoor neighbours. I think I may have spoken to more friends and family this weekend than I have since Christmas! I hope that you have managed to stay in touch with people just like I have.

Here is a picture of the cakes I made with my friend. I made pink icing by mixing raspberry jam in with the butter and icing as I didn’t have any food colouring… we have to get quite ingenious and think a little harder when we can’t simply nip to the shops don’t we?

What clever things have you done to keep yourself busy or overcome a problem this weekend? Let me know in the comments below. Right, I am off to read your emails and to mark your learning on My Maths and Purple Mash – and to set a bit more of course! I hope you enjoy your music lesson from your Home Study timetable today, I can just imagine some of the groovy moves your will dream up. Maybe someone could video you when you have mastered the words and dance moves then you can watch yourself perform too?

Have fun, Year 2.

Lots of love, Mrs Temp xx

Hello Year 2,

Aren’t we lucky to still have the sunshine to keep us cheerful and able to play outside! My children decided that we would do some exercise in the garden yesterday and set up a circuit for us to complete. I have to admit my arms are aching today from lifting weights and and my legs are a bit wobbly too! I think we will have to keep practising so that I get a bit fitter!

We went for a very long walk along some paths and through shady woods near our house and met this handsome chap, I wonder what his name is? We also spotted these nests high up in the trees, I wonder who lives there… my son thought pterodactyls? He is a bit bonkers though, but I thought it would make a great storybook idea!

While out walking this week, we kept looking for wild flowers and spotted so many kinds, we weren’t sure what these were, but discovered that they’re called wood anemone and cuckoo flowers! We saw the beginnings of bluebells and can’t wait to see them bloom very soon. Look what I made using pine cones that we gathered… they’re keeping me company on the windowsill by my desk.

While looking on Purple Mash at the work that lots of you have been doing, I discovered that there is a programme called 2email. I have sent you all a message and a couple of you have replied, I was truly delighted! Daniel told me that he has been reading The Witches by Roald Dahl and guess what, I found a copy on my daughter’s book shelf. I am enjoying reading it, just a chapter or two at a time, snuggled up under a blanket and having a bit of quiet time.

If you would like to send me an email to tell me a little of what you have been doing or just to say ‘hello’ then this is what you do:

1. Log in to Purple Mash using your username and password. (I always find Purple Mash on the school website under the Student Home tab)
2. Click on the black ‘Home‘ tab.
3. Click on the ‘Computing‘ section.
4. Click on 2email, then when it loads click on 2email again
5. You should see a message from me.
6. Scroll down and there is a reply button, click on it.
7. A box should appear for you to type your message in.
8. When you are finished, scroll down and click send!

On your home screen you should get a red number pop up on the purple ‘alert’ tab when you have new emails, look I have 8 alerts, that means I have work to check from you or maybe it is an email message! I will keep checking my alerts just in case there is a message from you, but remember that you can also put a comment on my blogs too, just by clicking the ‘comment’ button at the bottom.

Have a lovely weekend everyone. Be busy, be kind, be thoughtful, be helpful… we’re doing this together.

Love Mrs Temp xx

PS. I have just received a message from Mrs Barnett too, she says,

“Hello Class 2, I hope you are enjoying this lovely weather and enjoying your gardens. In my house, my husband and I have been clearing a space in the shed for our three boys to use a makeshift gym! We all need to be active to help keep us healthy…we all learnt this recently in science and PE didn’t we? Take care all of you, from Mrs Barnett”.

Hello, Year 2 Muggle Wumps and Roly Poly Birds (Do you remember which book these characters are from?) And hello to your parents too of course, who are luckily nothing like Mrs and Mrs Twit!

It was a very strange end to our week last week, with half our class in school and half our class at home.  We carried on learning, playing and being kind to each other and I was really touched by the cards and messages I received from you and your families. I have your drawings by my desk at home and they are a constant reminder of you all.

I hope that you have been able to enjoy the sunshine and you made sure that your mums had a lovely day yesterday? My mum loved her flower card that I made for her in our art lesson, I hope that your mum did too? She put it on her windowsill in the kitchen where she can see it when she washes up. She asked who had painted all the lovely colours for the petals and I explained that it was our Year 2 teamwork, something we are extremely good at. After our measuring lessons this week, I also practised my weighing skills to make a delicious Victoria sponge cake. I wonder whether you will be able to help weigh some ingredients to cook something while we are off school?

I hope that you are all ready for your spelling test tomorrow… only kidding, but please practise your spellings – set 10 of booklet 2, and maybe someone at teatime or while you’re in the bath could ask you how to spell them? There are lots of little ways to keep learning, even while in your pyjamas you can snuggle up with a good book! I am so glad that we managed to get to the end of The Twits, I am thinking about reading another Roald Dahl book this week, or maybe I will look for one of his book that have been made into a film,  there have been a few… The BFG, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Fantastic Mr Fox are just some that I know of.

I would love to know a little of what you have been up to, if you have something you would like to share then please comment on this blog so that we can keep in touch. I will write again at the end of the week to let you know what else I have been keeping busy with.

Much love,

Mrs Temp xxx

PS. If you are stuck for how to find out about a person or event in history for your topic task today, go to the BBC Bitesize page on our school website, there are lots of short videos in the history section.

If you use the ‘student home’ tab, click on BBC Bitesize and go to KS1 history, there are lots to look at… it will be tricky to decide what to learn about!

In fact, BBC Bitesize is really good for games and other learning too, have a look!

Thank you for such wonderful holiday homework that the children created –  with lots of your help I am sure! They were thrilled to share their efforts with each other and to find out about the different places that had been researched. The range of towns, cities and countries was impressive, as was the variety of ways that the work was presented.

This term we are learning about plants in science, mechanisms in DT, our local area in geography and Easter in RE. Quite a diverse range of learning but we will find ingenious ways to link them.

This week we began to think about how stories are structured, using a five part ‘story mountain’ plan. The children read my Jack and the Beanstalk story and together we edited and improved it. Words of the week became: curious, sheepish and tumbledown. The children were keen to use these words and many others to make their own Jack and the Beanstalk stories come to life. Similes, exclamations, questions and the use of ellipse… made the children’s stories fantastic to read. I think they were pretty proud of themselves too!

Next week we will be editing our story plans to change the characters, setting and key elements of the story line to really make each person’s story unique. I cannot wait to see what imaginative ideas they come up with!

Linked with the beanstalk story, in DT we have discussed that the giant really should have better defense systems for his castle to keep people like Jack out. So, we spent a lively afternoon investigating how pulleys work in preparation for designing castles, complete with mechanisms to lift and lower drawbridges and portcullises.

It is looking like a busy term already and it is only week 1!

Reading together is such fun!

This term our learning is all about wild things, that’s animals and humans! We have already started thinking about how all animals have babies, some which look like themselves and some that look entirely different. Creating our own new animals caused lots of laughter  in class as elephant trunks were added to fish bodies and zebra legs. The children invented new names for their creatures, being reminded that we actually needed to be able to pronounce them using our phonics! 

In English we wrote descriptions for our creatures, discovering how much better our writing sounded with a few adjectives added. This led to us learning how to describe actions using adverbs. The children are enjoying thinking of new adverbs to add to our collection and many are now using them in their work too.

After spending a number of weeks practising our multiplication and division, we are now exploring how we can use our knowledge to work out fractions. The initial few lessons used pizzas as an example of how to share into equal parts but the children complained that it made them too hungry so we moved quickly on to sharing groups of counters into halves, quarters and thirds. The children have really impressed us with how they have understood and applied their mathematical knowledge.

Another new exciting piece of learning this term is that we are all able to recite the seven continents of the world and locate them on a map. We have used a very catchy tune to help us, the children are often heard humming it during lessons and on their way around the school. If you haven’t heard it then be sure to ask a friendly Year 2 to sing it for you!

We have also been learning to sew – a skill which most of the children are mastering well… a few knots are of course inevitable. We cannot wait to finish our fabric bookmarks and proudly use them when we are reading for pleasure in class. Before beginning sewing or designing our bookmarks, the children had to explore how to make different types of stitches. Look how well they did!

I am pleased to say that my new class of eager Year 2’s are settling in well and already impressing me with their manners, hard work and learning. During our first few days together we discussed how we would like our class to be and all agreed that we wanted it to be fair and for us all to feel happy, as well as be able to learn well. We wrote a class charter and all promised to try our best to stick to it. It would have been helpful for it to be a bit shorter and therefore easier to remember but the children insisted that every point was important!

We have jumped straight into our first term’s topic about homes and the materials.

Spotting materials around school helped us to think about what different materials are good at and why different materials are used for particular jobs.

Once we knew a bit more about materials, we learnt about collage and how to make street scene pictures, choosing patterned papers that would look good as different parts of buildings. It was really exciting to see how far our collage street would stretch once joined together – some had to be put on the display boards in our cloakroom too!

Soon we will be starting our project about The Great Fire of London and designing and making models of Tudor houses. Thank you to all parents who hunted through kitchen cupboards to empty out suitably sized cardboard boxes. We now have a small mountain of cardboard that the children will enjoy sorting through to select their chosen building shape – no more to be sent in now, please!

We have one more swimming lesson next week, Tuesday 1st October, after that the children will be doing PE in school. Please make sure that kits are returned to school at the beginning of each week.

I am really proud of how the children have risen to the challenge of learning their weekly spellings, returning completed homework on time and reading regularly at home. Your support is hugely appreciated and undoubtedly benefits your child’s learning.

Mrs Temp