Highlights from Year 2

It has been a busy couple of months for Year 2. The children continued to show persistence and dedication throughout their end of key stage test period. Tests can be scary and stressful when you're only six and seven but all the staff at Ranikhet Academy couldn’t be prouder of how they conducted themselves and gave it their best try.

English

In English we have read the story ‘Dogger’ by Shirley Hughes which is all about losing a favourite toy. Lots of us could relate to this and remember a time when we lost something we really liked. We all brought our teddies and cuddly toys from home and thought about how it would feel if we lost them. We then have written our own lost story focusing on story structure and our descriptive language.

We also linked our English work to our Georgraphy topic about Australia. We looked at what the purpose of a post card was, and we were lucky enough to have been sent some from Greece and Kenya to look at. We created our own postcards about visiting Australia. We focused on how they were a short, informal piece of writing and tried our best to include some contractions.

Maths

In Maths we have covered a few tricky concepts. We have learnt how to recognize and find half, quarters, three quarters and thirds of shapes and numbers. We understand the difference between unit and non-unit factions as well as the equivalence between a half and two quarters.

Miss Hoke was impressed with our time telling. We began with quarter past and quarter to but then looked more closely at telling the time to the nearest five minutes. It can be tricky to decide if it is past the hour or to the next hour. With a bit of practice everyday we will get the hang of it!

Science

Science has been fun this half term as we have been exploring the uses of different materials and why they are suitable for a particular job. We experimented with three different materials; a stone, an elastic band and plasticine. We explored how they changed if we squash, twist, squeeze, bend, or stretch them. We found out that some materials don’t change at all.

RE

Year 2 have enjoyed learning about Muslim celebrations in RE this half term. We have lots of children that follow the Islamic faith and they have enjoyed sharing their experiences with the class. We began this topic by thinking about all the different celebration we know and what we each celebrate. We then went on to learn about the difference between Eid-al-Fitr and Eid -al- Adha. Mrs Tahir and some of our other children were a great help in sharing her experience of fasting and what this means during Ramadan. It was lovely to see how excited the children were to share their understanding in the class.

Spanish

Hola! Como estas.

In Spanish Year 2 have been learning all about different animals. We are very lucky to have two children who speak Spanish and have been helping all the class with the pronunciation. We have learnt through songs as well as playing games. It has been great fun. We can now say the names of ten different animals. Ask us and see if you can guess what they are.

Geography

We went on Ranikhet Airways and landed in Australia. We have explored all the different states and territories and are very good at remembering all eight using the atlas to help. We deepened our understanding of weather and climate and how these differ from place to place. We compared Darwin in the Northern Territory where it is hot all year round with Hobart in Tasmania where it can be warm but also sometimes snow. Most of us decided we would like to live in Darwin but also discussed how important suncream would be there.