We were very excited to come to school today dressed as one of the characters from Narnia! How fantastic we looked!

Thank you to parents for making such a brilliant effort!

In the Christian calendar, this is the day of feasting before Ash Wednesday. It’s a day when people enjoy rich, fatty foods and sweet treats, such as pancakes, in preparation for Lent.

As you can see Y2 thoroughly enjoyed the feast this morning!

To conclude our ‘Explorers’ topic and our learning about Captain Cook and his three voyages around the world, we enjoyed our Spring art project.

We know that Captain Cook’s journey to Tahiti wasn’t an easy one as, at times, the weather made it very dangerous. After looking at some photographs of calm and stormy seas, we thought carefully about the difference in colours.

We worked collaboratively with our partner, just like Team Ant, and created some fantastic colour wraps using a variety of different materials. Some of us used colours to reflect the calmer days of his journey across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans whereas some of us decided to use colours to represent the more dangerous and stormy days.

We then did some colour mixing to make different shades of blue, green and grey before painting our own calm or stormy sea.

After this, we enjoyed carefully drawing the Endeavour (Captain Cook’s ship) using pencils and graphite. We noticed lots of the details and tried hard to include these in our own observational drawing.

We also did some observational drawings of different shells.

Finally, we worked collaboratively in small groups to create our own tie-dye. For this, we used different shades of blue and green dye to reflect the colours of the oceans.

How fantastic our art work is!

Our new Science topic is all about…MATERIALS!

We noticed lots of different materials around us in our classroom. After going on a material hunt, we thought about why materials are used for certain objects and the different properties that they have. We agreed that wood wouldn’t be a suitable material for a window as it is not transparent but would be suitable for a table as it is strong and sturdy.

We were very excited to check our mini-beast hotels this morning, especially when we discovered they did in fact have some guests inside!

Unfortunately, some of them moved a lot faster than Mrs Brown so we were unable to take a photo but here are some of the mini-beasts we did manage to capture on camera…

As our ‘habitats‘ topic draws to an end, we were given the challenge of answering this investigation question…

‘Which mini-beasts would you find outside in Autumn?’

We thoroughly enjoyed creating a mini-beast hotel where we added things that we thought mini-beasts would like, including: grass, leaves, moss, sticks and small rocks. After carefully filling our cardboard boxes, we found an area to place it.

We are looking forward to seeing whether our hotels have any visitors over the next few days.

In our PSHE lesson this week we discussed what makes somebody a good friend and how we can be a good friend to others. 

As this week is Anti-Bullying week‘, we thought about what bullying looks like and what we should do if we see somebody being unkind to somebody else or if a person is unkind to us. 

In preparation for our KS1 anti-bullying picket, we enjoyed making our own posters. We showed lots of enthusiasm this afternoon when using these in our own picket although we may now have some sore throats! 

Lots of us also came to school wearing odd socks for Anti-Bullying week.

Before we kicked started our new topic which is all about Kolkata, a city in India, we recapped our Year 1 learning about the UK.

We worked collaboratively, just like Team Ant, to put the four countries of the UK together, using a map to help us. We discussed which country is the largest and smallest and that the UK is an island because it is surrounded by water. We then recapped the capital cities of the four countries.

We then used Digi-maps (an online map) to locate Leeds on a map of the UK and we even found our school! We then zoomed out of Leeds, the UK and even out of Europe, until we located India.

We noticed that India is a lot larger than the UK. We used the map to zoom in on Kolkata.

We then used a map of India to find out which countries surround it and used these to locate them on our own map.

We then enjoyed sampling some chai and poppadoms!

We thoroughly enjoyed our art project today and what beautiful work we produced! 

After reading the story ‘The Spider Weaver‘, we were inspired to create our own ‘wondrous web’ just like the one that the characters saw in the story. 

We began by experimenting with different techniques using the oil pastels including: hatching, cross hatching, drawing zig-zag and dashed lines. This then helped us when it came to creating our own webs. To help us, we looked at some photos of spider webs and imitated the designs. 

We then used the water colour paints to add a wash to the background. We used green as in the story, the web that the characters found was in a banana tree. 

We then added some more details to our webs using the oil pastels before adding sequins. To finish, we used the running stitch to add some texture to our designs.  

Our webs are all unique just like the webs that spiders create and how amazing they look! 

Year 2 had a special visitor this week – Tony Peek who is a poet. We enjoyed listening to some of Tony’s poems – some were very funny and some were a little scary!

We were then challenged to write some of our own silly poems that included alliteration.

What an exciting morning we had!