Giraffes

Welcome to Giraffes!

Class Teacher: Miss Fulford

Teaching Assistant: Miss Griffiths

General Information

Our topic this half-term is ‘Celebrations’ In History, we will be learning all about school in the past. We will start with the Victorian era, then when our grandparents came to school (1950s and 1960s) before learning about school when our parents came (1980s and 1990s). In Science this half term, we will be investigating different materials. We are going to be finding out about the properties, purposes and suitability of everyday materials before looking at how some materials can be recycled.  In Design and Technology we will be learning about how different toys work before designing, making and evaluating a wind up toy.  

Reading

In Year 2 we work on key skills daily, through our daily Guided Reading sessions. Your child will also have a reading book to bring home, which we will change once they have finished it. Please read as often as possible at home, even if it's only a few pages at a time! In addition to this, we will regularly visit our fabulous library and be able to choose one to take home. Again, this can be changed as soon as it’s finished.

Phonics and Spelling

We have a daily phonics lesson, usually focusing on a few sounds or one spelling rule each week. Each half-term we have a spelling quiz based on our Year 2 tricky words, which we'll send home each week to practise.

P.E.

Our P.E. day is Wednesday. We will be focusing on balance and co-ordination this half-term. 

Show and Tell

Each week a different table will be invited to bring something in for show and tell on Fridays. Please encourage your child to bring in something either related to our topic or handmade. The dates for this are as followed:

 19.1.24 & 8.3.24 -  Tigers

 26.1.24 & 15.3.24-  Leopards 

 2.2.24 & 22.3.24 - Camels

 9.2.24 & 29.3.24- Lions

 23.2.24 & 26.4.24- Zebras

1.3.24 & 3.5.24 - Rhinos 

Exciting Learning Websites 

Below are some exciting websites where you can practise your writing and maths skills. 

We have had such a brilliant World Book Day! As well as a visit from a previous pupil who has written a book, we have taken part in lots of reading-related activities and written a piece of non-fiction to create our own class book. 

What a fantastic day we had with Rock Kids UK! We had so much fun being introduced to rock music with some super workshops, and we spent some time playing TT rock stars too.

Us: Giraffes, pull your best rock star face!

The Giraffes:

This afternoon we used our skills that we learnt at Hepworth to create our very own animals sculptures! We can't wait to see how they turn out when they are dried and painted.

The Giraffes had a FANTASTIC trip out to the Hepworth Gallery! We took part in a super workshop with an artist who showed us how to make realistic sculptures. We will use our knowledge to help us make some animal sculptures later this half term.

Four our first P.E. lesson of the year, we got all the apparatus out and did lots of work on our core! Lots of balancing, problem solving and agility skills were needed to make their way around our obstacles. What a great start to the year!

This week we are beginning to write our own spell based on Macbeth's Witches Spell. For our experience Day, we made our own potions! We loved mixing and adding our own strange ingredients. 

We had lots of fun on Wear it Red day! This afternoon, we talked about how hurtful words can be. We wrote some on paper and scrunched it up, later discovering we couldn't get the paper back to normal again. This demonstrates how words can be hurtful for a long time, even if we say sorry.

Some fabulous Reading Ambassadors from our feeder school, Oatlands Junior School, came to visit us this afternoon and read us a story. It was fabulous to see all the Giraffes so engaged and loving seeing the books they will read later in their school life!

Our next text in English is all about autumn objects, so this morning we headed off on a walk to see what we could find. When we got back to school, we used our fabulous vocabulary to describe the objects. What a super way to start the week! 

Last week we started our learning on addition and subtraction. Using manipulatives such as cubes/counters is great way to secure our understanding of maths concepts, but we went one better and used conkers! Here the Giraffes are practising writing fact families, and they did brilliantly too!

In R.E. this term we are learning about special books to different religions. This is a picture of one of our Torahs, a special book for Jewish people. The Giraffes couldn't believe how big it is! We also learned about the Bible and the Quran.

Our first topic in Maths is place value. We've been exploring lots of different numbers to 100, making them in different ways using the dienes to help us. 

This week we got out the glockenspiels and had a go at playing along to the tune of 'You Are My Sunshine'. The Giraffes loved learning about the different notes and the different sounds they could make.