Remote Learning

Happy Friday! We hope that you are all well and that you are staying safe on this windy and blustery day. For those who are able to do some activities today, here are some ideas that you can complete at home.

We are going to be meeting virtually if you are able to join us at 9.30 and 1.15 for around 10 minutes. Please see the email from the office with links to join. We’re also available at year2@damers.dorset.sch.uk for any home learning questions/photos to share tomorrow.

We’ve included some ideas below similar to what we’d be doing in class. You may also enjoy some of these ideas:

• Make a pillow fort with blankets and cushions
• Write a story about anything you like! 
• Enjoy a movie with your family if you can
• Help an adult make a healthy snack or tasty treat
• Listen to your favourite songs
• Show off your best dance moves 

Maths

In maths this week we have been learning about mass. You might want to have a look at the packaging of some food items and see how much these items weigh. Can you put these items in order of lightest to heaviest?

If you have access to scales then you could weigh different objects from around the house and compare their weights. Can you put these in order using the < (less than), > (greater than) and = (equal to) signs? 

Alternatively, if you don’t have access to scales you can order the objects by feeling how heavy they are, the lego brick is lighter than the book.

Online activities

My Maths – Many of you will have access to your My Maths password, there are lots of activities on here which you can complete even if they have not been set by your teacher. https://www.mymaths.co.uk/ 

We have set some mymaths work on measures for completion over the next two weeks. 

TT Rockstars https://ttrockstars.com/ 

Numbots https://numbots.com/ 

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

Writing

We know how much you have loved becoming experts on Emperor Penguins so now we would like you to find out about an animal from the Arctic – the Polar Bear!

You can watch these links to find out more about polar bears (as always, adults please check any external links first as external adverts and comments may be enabled). 

https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/facts/polar-bear There are some facts on here and a video further down too.

Using the information that you have learnt about Polar Bears we would like you to create a non-chronological report. You can use the same structure and subheadings as we did for the Emperor Penguins (there is an example layout below or you can download the pdf). You might want to follow a structure similar to this:

Paragraph 1- introduction

Paragraph 2 – Where do polar bears live?

Paragraph 3 – How have polar bears adapted to live in the Arctic?

Paragraph 4 – What do polar bears eat?

Paragraph 5 – What do polar bears look like?

Wow fact – perhaps you could include a fact about polar bear cubs, how far they can swim or something that you find really interesting.

Home learning project

Our home learning projects are in full swing, thank you if you have shared this with us already. If you haven’t completed an activity yet you can find more information here: http://www.damers.dorset.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/HL-Y2-spr1-22.pdf 

***update. In light of adverse weather conditions, please see the email from Mrs Smith regarding remote learning sent on 17.02.22*** Please stay safe today (Friday).

It’s the end of another week and another half term. Can you believe we’re halfway through year 2?

Thank you for spending your time with us this week during our parent consultation appointments. If you’ve not been able to make it, please speak with one of us by the gate in the morning or afterschool.

In art we have finished our amazing works of symmetry using water colours and oil pastels. Can you tell which side is the photograph and which side is our art work? 

A few months ago, we ‘planted’ our hyacinth bulbs. They’ve started flowering now and produce such an amazing smell. Some of the children thought they smelt similar to soaps or lavender; others thought they were reminded of sweets! 

It has been a windy few days so PE with Mr Senior was spent in the large hall practising some throwing, ducking and moving techniques!

We’ve continued thinking about mass and weight in class. If possible, it would be great if you could follow a recipe together that involves weighing out some ingredients at home. If you have access to a device, you could use this interactive scale: https://mathsframe.co.uk/en/resources/resource/87/itp-measuring-scales 

In class we set the scales to 1000 (grams) with intervals of 10.

During wet playtimes we have enjoyed using Google Quick Draw on the whiteboard: https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/

Over half term, we hope you have a wonderful week and a chance to rest after a very busy January and February.

You may have received an email about an ‘extreme reading’ challenge. Please find a copy of the contents below:

Another week done and dusted – where does the time go?! 

We’ve enjoyed using balancing and measuring scales to help us measure mass/weight in grams and kilograms this week. We’ve estimated, measured and read different scales to help us. 

We’ve been focusing on some sentence structures this week. We’re working on our lovely joined up handwriting and using words called conjunctions (‘so’, ‘or’, ‘but’) to help us extend our sentences. 

Thank you for sharing your ongoing home learning projects with us. It has been great seeing so many of your boat experiments too! 

We got muddy in PE this week using skills to help us dodge, twist, turn and maneuver with rugby balls. 

In art we’ve been thinking about what we see in nature. In the past we talked about spirals and circles. We’ve explored how we can often see symmetry in nature and have explored whether we can see this with animals’ faces such as owls and tigers. 

Internet Safety Day 

Today is national Safer Internet Day and we have spent time in class discussing how we use the internet in our day-to-day lives and how to stay safe when online or when using technology with a particular focus on online gaming. The discussions we had in class today might be a good starting point for a discussion at home about online safety so if your child can’t remember what they did at school today then ask them about how they can stay safe online and they might be able to give you a few pointers!

We also read a story about DigiDuck and his friends who used a device to play an online game.

 

For more information you can also look at our Online Safety pages on the Damers website here http://www.damers.dorset.sch.uk/parents/online-safety/ or you could also visit the national Safer Internet Day website at https://saferinternet.org.uk/safer-internet-day/safer-internet-day-2022 

Happy Friday! We hope that you have had a good week, we can’t believe it is now February! 

We have been busy with our learning and have continued to learn about Emperor Penguins. Did you know that Emperor Penguins are the biggest of the penguin species and are around 115cm tall? We enjoyed measuring ourselves and working out how big they were compared with us. 

This week we have taken part in a Literacy Festival which has been kindly funded by the PTA.

We heard an extract from Catherine Emmett’s book, The Pet, and learnt about how she creates her characters and how the illustrator, David Tazzyman, then draws them. We also took part in a storytelling session with Emily Hanna-Graze Brook and a session with author Ross Collins too.

In art we have continued to look at Symmetry in Nature, this week our focus has been on owls. We enjoyed looking at the majestic barn owl and sketching its face. We have also enjoyed painting our own abstract owls too.

We are loving writing our own emperor penguin information books and can’t wait to get these finished.

Our home learning projects are in full swing. These can be shared with us whenever they are finished although we hope to see them all after half term. Follow this link for full details: http://www.damers.dorset.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/HL-Y2-spr1-22.pdf 

Some super effort was made here to create a life size emperor penguin complete with an information book in the style of an egg! Thank you for supporting the children at home with their additional learning opportunities and please continue to read daily with your children. 

A message from Mr Moore: 

The CPRE National Star count is back from Saturday 26th February – Sunday 6th March. If you want to get involved, choose a clear night between 26 February – 6 March 2022 and look to the skies to see how many stars you can spot within Orion.

https://takeaction.cpre.org.uk/page/95329/data/1?locale=en-GB

Penguins have become our big focus in Year 2 recently! We have loved finding out facts about emperor penguins and how they survive in the challenging Antarctic climate. We’ve looked at different non-fiction texts called non chronological reports and have planned our own. We are looking forward to making our own books about the emperor penguin.

We’ve been continuing to measure with metres and centimeters and have had a go at some challenging word problems too. 

You might want to explore measuring at home, can you find things which are bigger than 1m and less than 1m. Or you could explore the length of these lines using the ruler in this game. 

We’ve been thinking about spirals we can see in nature. We were amazed at how many spirals we could see in the images we looked at. From tiny snail shells to huge elephant’s trunks and small chameleon’s tails. We enjoyed sketching and shading an elephant’s trunk from a photograph and imagined it kept spiralling and spiralling.

We’re getting the measure of things this week in maths! We’ve been using metre sticks, trundle wheels and rulers to help us measure in metres (m) and centi-meters (cm).

It has been fun measuring different things we have in school from our pencils to the playground! We’ve talked about the importance of how to start measuring. Have a look at this challenge together. Is the crayon 8cm long? 

We enjoyed a virtual visit from Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service. The children enjoyed learning about all of the different jobs that firefighters do and also talked about how to keep safe at home. The children learnt how many smoke alarms houses should have and how often they should be tested.

Follow this link for information for adults about smoke alarms: https://www.dwfire.org.uk/safety/safety-at-home/smoke-alarms/ 

And how to plan an escape in the event of an emergency: https://www.dwfire.org.uk/safety/safety-at-home/plan-your-escape/ 

Outdoors, we have been thinking about nature. In art we discussed where we can see circles in nature – from animals to food, plants and parts of the world and even other planets too! We’ve been exploring our local environment to see where we can spot circles/round shapes. We found lots: from the pond, to the frogspawn (yes,frogspawn in January!), to the ripples in the water and plants and logs all around us! 

Our class has been loving learning about the polar regions and we’ve taken a particular shine to penguins and Antarctica! We are learning how information texts (non chronological reports) can be written by looking at examples and finding features. We can’t get enough of penguins right now and are looking forward to writing our own reports about them soon. 

We can’t believe it is already week 2 into our new half term! We have had an action packed week full of some amazing learning and making the most of the sunshine, even though it has seemed to feel a little bit chillier!

In literacy we have continued to explore our new text Lila and the Secret of Rain, we had lots of fun using pictures on a story map to help us to record the different events that took place in the story.

We then began to use these to help us retell the story. The text has also helped us to think about the weather in Kenya and how this is different to the weather we see in the UK. In the story, Lila was upset that it had not been raining as it meant her crops could not grow which helped us to explore why we need the rain for lots of different reasons. 

Thank you to those who had a go at the division questions on MyMaths, I have been really impressed with our mathematical skills in division this past week. We have been looking at dividing by 2, 5 and 10 and using different strategies such as grouping to help us solve these equations. We have also started looking at the inverse of division and using our times table facts to help us. 

We’ve also discussed how knowing one number fact, can help us with others. For example:

On Tuesday, we investigated and looked for where we could see circles within nature. It was really interesting to see that there are lots of circles within nature all around us. Here are some of them: 

What other examples can you think of or find?
We looked closely at peacock feathers and spent some time drawing these. We focused on using our pencils to create different shades and tones to highlight the light and dark within these feathers. 

Happy New Year! We hope that you were able to have a happy and restful holiday; it has been lovely to see you all again this week.

We have started to look at the concept of division in Maths and used manipulatives to practise sharing things into equal groups. You might want to have a go at sharing some items at home, such as pasta or toys, into equal groups using the 2, 5 and 10 times table. We’re setting some home learning for mymaths to practise some division challenges. Well done to those of you who had a go at the optional task over the Christmas break.

You may like to play an online division game to help practise dividing: https://www.ictgames.com/mobilePage/doggyDivision/index.html 

We have also started our new Literacy text – Lila and the Secret of Rain. We have enjoyed reading this traditional tale and have talked about how it is similar/different to the traditional tales we read earlier this year.

You may enjoy listening to the story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04gRXlPnEeo or you could mute/pause the video to read it yourselves. 

We’ve been enjoying using a book called an Atlas to learn about the world. Combined with Google Earth, we have been revising the continents of the world and learning about certain countries.

We have enjoyed learning about how many different countries there are in Africa and liked using maps to find out where countries like Kenya are from. We have looked at different artefacts from some countries around the world. We really enjoyed looking at how some people use recycled materials to make toys, instruments or ornaments/jewelry. 

Ho Ho How quickly time flies when you’re having fun. I can’t believe we’re at the end of a very busy term. Thank you to all our families for your support so far in Year 2. We’re very grateful for your kind words as we end the autumn term.

We’ve been busy in maths thinking about the value of coins and different shape names. We enjoyed using tangrams to help create different shapes, patterns and objects – we’ve enjoyed learning the word ‘parallelogram’ too! 

We’ve been learning about the word ‘religion’ and talking about what ‘beliefs’ mean. We have learnt that there are many different religions. We have learnt about some buildings that are particularly special in some religions such as a church, mosque and synagogue. We recognised some symbols like the cross on churches, the Star of David on synagogues and star and crescent on mosques. 

It’s been a festive week with many special days. Many of us enjoyed a Christmas dinner on Wednesday. On Thursday, we sang, danced and cheered along to a special virtual pantomime edition of Cinderella (Oh Yes We Did!) and on Friday we enjoyed virtually joining in with the Year 4’s Christmas talent show, Xmas Factor! 

We’re sending some passwords home for TT-rockstars which also has details for how to login to ‘numbots’, a fun interactive series of games and maths learning to help with arithmetic. https://ttrockstars.com/ 

 Additionally there are logins for ‘my maths’, another interactive maths app that includes lessons and games that will cover a series of teacher-set topics. An optional lesson has been set on mymaths for over the holidays but it is only there if you would like to access some additional activities. https://www.mymaths.co.uk/ 

We will aim to trial this more for Friday homework tasks in January. 

We hope you’re able to enjoy a happy and restful holiday after a very busy term. Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.