Otters

In science this week we have investigated and learnt about the lifecycle of a ladybird. We drew a body and put the lifecycle on the circle. We then created wings and a head.

We also learned about food chains. All food chains start with a vegetable or plant, these are the producers. The prey is the one that gets eaten and the consumer is the one that searches for food. Humans are predators.

We have also been doing reading quizzes so we have been working really hard. In between doing the quizzes we have done lots of different activities in the hall, or outside. Outside we have been making domino caterpillars and a minibeast quiz and had to search for different facts around the playground. We also did some calculator work where we were code crackers and we had to work out how much each minibeast was worth.

Ant : a = 1, n = 14 and t = 20 All added together = 35

Can you find some minibeasts of your own and find out how much they are worth?

We also spent some time drawing Beatrix Potter characters. We then colour mixed and blended to paint them with accurate colours.

This week we have been working hard on boxing up a Peter Rabbit story.  We then created our own story using the boxes.  We then made the story more interesting and put it lots of detail by drawing out our S plan.  Today we wrote our new stories out in full showing a beginning, a problem, a solution and an end.

We have been very resilient this week as we have been doing lots of maths quizzes.  When we were not doing the quizzes we have done lots of fun activities outside the classroom.  Some of us did some gardening and planted some vegetables to harvest later in the year.  A group of us did a scavenger hunt looking for particular items around the school grounds and we then made a picture out of the items. We have also visited the library and been able to choose some new books.  We spent a lovely morning in the school hall creating and designing our own minibeasts.  We wrote facts about them and then some of us also attempted to build them out of lego and multilink.  A few of us designed minibeast houses.  Yesterday and today we have been code cracking. We used a code and calculators to find out the value of various minibeasts.

In music this week we have been very creative. We have been thinking again about the music we want to create for our minibeast groups and looked at the different instruments and their names.  We then talked as a class about how we could record which instruments we want to use and how we want to play them.

Our art this week was painting. We were blending and mixing to create different tints.  We started with a light colour and made it gradually darker by adding black a little at a time.  We painted caterpillars.

For PE Mrs Ash was teaching us Tri golf, following on from our success at the Tri golf competition.

This week we have revised subtracting, multiplying, dividing, adding and finding fractions of numbers.  We have reminded ourselves how to use written methods to help us solve sums.  In English we have done lots of writing.  We wrote descriptions of Peter and Mr McGregor.  We tried to describe how Mr McGregor felt. We also wrote a diary entry from Peter’s point of view.

In science we went on a bug hunt to see what lives in the field and under logs.  We then put our results into a Venn diagram.  We found spiders, ants, earwigs and worms were in all the places.  In music we listened to different types of music and tried to see if we could guess what minibeast or animal it was supposed to make us think of.  We all loved ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’, you can listen to it on YouTube. Can you find any other bits of music that make you think of an animal?

In English we have been studying Peter Rabbit.  We learnt part of the story as a story map, with actions.  (Amelia) We looked at different pictures from the story and wrote sentences about how Peter Rabbit might be feeling and what was happening.  On Friday we looked at a few scenes from Peter Rabbit and worked in pairs to do some freeze framing.

This week in PE we practised our tennis skills, we threw the balls in the air and caught them, then we had to bounce them with the tennis rackets. (Amelia) We then tried bouncing the balls against the wall followed by hitting the ball as far as we could across the field. (Alyssa)  We finished the lesson with a little game of tennis.

For music we tried making sounds that reminded us of different minibeasts.  We are going to compose our own music and we experimented with different instruments to see which ones suited the minibeasts the best. (Alyssa) We are going to learn how to record our music.

In maths we have been solving lots of different word problems, using addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.  (Charlie O) We had to read the problem carefully to decide what calculation we need to carry out and to find the important information.

For science we discussed the things around us and whether they are alive, dead or never been alive.  (Charlie O) Can you put these in the right category?  Can you think of other things that fit into each category?

For English on Monday we looked at a riddle about a strawberry.  We then chose a minibeast and were resourceful in researching our minibeasts, using books and ipads.  We needed lots of information and facts about our minibeasts so that we could make our own What Am I riddles.

We also drew pictures of our minibeasts and today we illustrated our riddles, which will be on display in our corridor.

In maths we have been learning about money and how to add to sums of money together.  We partitioned the numbers to help us add them.

43p + 25p  = 68p

10+10+10+10              10+10                    60p

1+1+1                             1+1+                        8p

For science we investigated which parts of a plant we can eat and were surprised at how many different bits we can eat.  For example we eat stems when we eat asparagus, fruit when we eat pepper, leaves when we eat bay leaves and the root when we eat carrots!  We also learnt about the different parts of a plant and what they do.

In art we have painted different fruit, vegetables, flowers and birds and mice to put in our ‘Mr McGregor’s Garden’ display.  We looked very carefully at the detail on the plants and animals and tried to make our paintings as accurate as possible.

For the beginning of this term we have had two art days.  On Monday we stayed in our own classroom and we sketched flowers.  We then took pictures of the flowers using the ipads.  When we had a picture we liked we zoomed in and did a screen shot.  We then printed these out and used them to paint flowers in the style of Georgia O’Keefe.  She was an American artist who painted lots of big flowers, but they were always bigger then the canvas to create beautiful paintings.

In maths this week we have been looking at odd and even numbers to remind ourselves what they look like.  We remembered that we cannot share odd numbers equally between two.  We discovered that when we add two odd numbers or two even numbers together they always make an even number.  We then looked at missing numbers in number sentences.  The missing number can be anywhere in the sum, at the beginning, at the end or in the middle.

In English we have been reading The Scarecrows’ Wedding, by Julia Donaldson.  We have been writing sentences using conjunctions to join two small sentences together.

‘You can come to our wedding if you give us a feather.’

Harry O’Hay went to collect pink flowers, but he needed water.’

Also in art we have been creating our own scarecrows using various materials to make them as realistic as possible.

In English this week we boxed up some non-fiction writing about made up animals making sure that the information was under the correct sub-heading. (Amber)

In DT (Design and Technology) we designed African masks using lots of different colours and suggestions for what we could make them out of.  The masks were animals, humans or a mixture of the two.  On Thursday we started making our masks using all the different materials that we had used in our designs.

On Wednesday we had an exciting and fun-filled Science Day.  In year Two we examined poo !! (it was fake).  We were looking at the poo to see if we could tell why there were different types of poo.  We looked at meat eaters – Carnivores, plant eaters – Herbivores, and animals that eat meat and plants – Omnivores.  We decided that the animals’ poo that we were looking at were a tiger (carnivore), and elephant (herbivore) and a badger (omnivore).  We also did different experiments in different year groups.  We investigated how our hands felt in different temperature water and how to keep water warm with different materials.  When we went in to the Forest Area we made dens and had to try to make them waterproof.  Mrs Newman poured water over them to test how waterproof they were!

In maths this week we have been learning all about fractions and how to find a fraction of a two digit number by sharing.