Welcome to our Heroes class page 2021/22
We are the Year 2 class at Warren Hills Community Primary School. Our teachers are Mrs Felstead and Miss Horrill. Mrs Smith and Miss Starr are our teaching assistants to support the class.
PE this term will be on a Wednesday
Please ensure that your child has an indoor kit consisting of a white t-shirt, dark shorts and plimsols or trainers. They will also need outside kit consisting of dark tracksuit bottoms or leggings, white t-shirt and trainers. Please ensure that long hair is tied back, earrings must be removed (if your child cannot remove earrings themselves please ensure that they are taken out before they come to school).
Swimming this term will be on Tuesday
Payment for this can be made on ParentPay at a subsidised cost of £1.50 per week. Please ensure that your child has the appropriate kit of a one piece swimsuit, a swimming hat and a towel.
We Love Reading
In our class, we know how important reading is to help us learn and we follow a reading scheme in our school called Read, Write, Inc. We each have a home reading folder to bring our books home in every day and a yellow reading record. We enjoy reading at home and know how important it is to practise with our parents/carers regularly to help us become successful readers.
A note from the teacher: Please ensure that your child brings their home reading folder back to school every day and remember to enjoy spending some time listening to your child read each day.
Summer 2
We hope you enjoyed your half term break and got chance to celebrate the Queen's Jubilee. We are moving into the last half term of the year with still lots to pack in. Our topic this term is 'Coastline' where we will be looking at features of a coastline, developing our map reading and using a compass. We will look at why Grace Darling is a significant person from our history and look at the work of the RNLI. We will be getting ourselves ready for sports day and rehearsing for Warren Hills has got Talent!
Summer 1
We hope you had an eggcellent Easter holidays and ready for the term ahead where our topic is 'Wriggle and Crawl'. We will be looking at creepy crawlies, reading stories about different minibeasts to inspire our writing and making fact files about the minibeasts we look at. We will hopefully watch butterflies hatch from caterpillars, worms burrowing in our wormery and we might have some giant snails come to visit us! We will continue to assess and plan for work that children may have missed due to the latest lockdown.
HOMEWORK IDEAS
All about snails
Science - Snail investigations
We had great fun looking carefully at snails. We could see their eyes on top of their tentacles and they made slime trails all over the table! We tested their sense of smell using vinegar on the paper and we put some real and pretend lettuce out for them. When we had finished our investigations we let them go outside.
Class pets!
We have some class pets to help us with our topic. Mrs Felstead didn't put the lid on properly over night and the next morning some of them had escaped into the classroom! We will be looking at them closely in our science lessons before releasing them into the Forest School area.
Maths - measuring
We have been trying to measure minibeast pictures accurately using a ruler.
English
We spent a lot of time planning our own bee stories and then writing them.
Arrival of the caterpillars
ICT
This term we are looking at how people make our computer programs by coding. We are having a go ourselves - it’s great fun!
Minibeast day!
We started our topic with a minibeast day in the glorious sunshine. We used our information books to help us identify some of the creepy crawlies we found. We made some minibeast homes in the hope we will have some moving in!
Spring 2
We hope you had a good half term break. This half term our topic is 'Towers, tunnels and turrets'. We will be looking at castles and even going on a school trip to Tamworth castle (look out for more info via letters and email), we will be looking at tunnels and bridges. We will continue to go swimming on a Tuesday morning.
HOMEWORK IDEAS
Farm trip
We had a lovely day at Manor Farm even though it rained on us! We went on a long walk to look around the fields and stop for some pond dipping. We all enjoyed the sheep barn where we actually got to see two lambs being born and Miss Horrill helped the farmer.
Competition time!
We have been practising the 'unknown' sport of cup stacking which is highly competitive. Some of us were chosen to compete against some other primary schools.
Castle trip
What a fun and tiring day out we had at Tamworth Castle. We helped dress a knight and get the table ready for the Lord and Lady of the castle. We explored the castle and got a little scared near the haunted stairs.
A dragon's egg!!
A dragon's egg arrived at school for us to look after so we had to do some research and write down some instructions.
We used 'bossy' verbs to start our instructions and had to write them in the present tense.
Science - looking for tunnelling worms!
Science - Where do worms like to live?
To start our investigation we had to collect worms. We learnt that adult worms have a saddle and worms have tiny hairs on their bodies to help them move along.
Where do worms like to live continued....
We chose different materials for our worms to live in; soil, sand, bark, stones, grass and twigs. We put the worms in the middle of the materials and left them overnight to chose where they would like to live. The next day we carefully looked to see which material the worms were living in. The worms mainly chose soil and sand.
Spring 1
We hope you had a lovely Christmas and a Happy New Year. This term will be a messy one with our topic 'Muck mess and mixtures'. We will be starting the topic with a messy day with lots more creative sessions planned. We will be using the brilliant story of George's Marvellous Medicine by Roald Dahl to inspire our writing. There will be lots of science fun too with some mixing and investigative work. We will also be starting our weekly swimming sessions on a Tuesday, please use parent pay to pay for the sessions. If you have any worries or concerns about swimming please come and talk to us.
Homework Ideas
Science day
We had a brilliant day doing science experiments. Mrs Felstead made an erupting volcano, minty geyser and flying film cannister. We made rainbow rain, fizzing potions, skittles pattern and melted a coloured ice cube in oil. We learnt how mixing certain ingredients causes a chemical reaction. If you mix an acid (vinegar or lemon juice)with an alkaline (bicarbonate of soda) carbon dioxide gas is formed. Our favourite was the minty geyser because Mrs Felstead nearly got covered in coke!
Not so messy art work!
We have been using the paint program to create our own 'Mondrian' pieces of art. We learnt how to use the fill and line buttons.
Hot and cold science
We made jelly using hot and cold water. We even mixed the colours/flavours! Mrs Smith carried out an investigation to see what would happen to different foods when they were heated up. Mrs Felstead had prepared some ice cube paints which were great fun to paint with. We observed changes from a solid to a liquid, liquid to a gas, liquid to a solid and gas to a liquid.
Yum yum!
The jelly was delicious!
What is mud?
In science we carefully measured out different amounts of water and added it to our soil samples. We had to explore the mud to see what properties it had.
"I can stretch this sample."
"I can roll it into a ball."
"This is too runny!"
"It feels smooth."
When we looked through the soil samples we had to record what we found using science knowledge from the Autumn term:
Living, Never lived or Dead
"I found a worm!"
"This plastic lid has never lived."
"These leaves are dead."
ICT
We have been exploring the 'Tate kids' website and created our own pieces of art work. It was quite difficult using the touch pad to draw with.
George's Marvellous Medicine
George's Marvellous medicine has inspired our writing and poetry work. We have come up with some great command sentences....
"Go and get my medicine!"
We have used some great adverbs.....
Grandma began to grow quickly through the roof.
We have used some expanded noun phrases....
George mixed the brown gloopy medicine.
We have used commas in list sentences....
He put in shampoo, lipstick and toothpaste.
We have used some exclamation sentences....
How quickly Grandma grew through the roof!
ICT
Not quite so 'messy' art work using the laptops.
Maths
We have been looking at temperature and reading scales.
Science
Which material is a good insulator? We tested different containers to see which one would keep the water warmest for longest. We carefully read the scale on the side of the thermometer and recorded our findings.
Maths
We have been looking at the capacity of different containers.
Science
We have been investigating what happens to different materials when water is added. We had to find out if they would mix, stir, pour, dissolve, sink or float. We discovered that oil floats on the top of water and sugar dissolves.
A messy day!
Autumn 2 2021
We hope you had a lovely half term break and ready for the long and manic stretch to Christmas! Our topic this term is 'Bounce' which will help to get us healthy and fit. We will be going to the leisure centre to take part in a multiskills event with other local primary schools. We will have some bouncing fun on a variety of spacehoppers! Hopefully we will be able to perform a Christmas play to the parents this year - fingers crossed!
HOMEWORK IDEAS
Advent
We have been learning about advent is a time of preparation for Christians for the celebration of the arrival of Jesus. We made our own advent wreaths.
Do all balls bounce?
We carried out an investigation in science to find out if all balls bounce and what surface was the best to bounce a ball on. The hard class floor was the best surface. The pom pom balls were rubbish at bouncing. The football and tennis ball were good bouncers.
Paralympian athlete - Claire Cashmore
We had a very inspiring assembly from Paralympian Claire Cashmore. She came to our class to answer our questions and show us her Paralympian medals!
How clean are your teeth?
We have been talking about how to look after our teeth. You need to brush them twice a day for 2 minutes. Some of us have lost our baby teeth!
How much sugar?
This was quite shocking to see! We weighed out how much sugar is in some of our snacks which was more than our daily allowance. We looked at sugar swaps - choosing snacks that contain less sugar. Look on change4life website for good ideas.
We ate a biscuit then looked to see where it had stuck to our teeth! We will be brushing our teeth well so the sugar in the biscuit can’t harm our teeth.
Science
We put germs (glitter) on some of our hands to see how and where the germs would spread. The results were quite surprising! We found out that germs on our hands can spread very easily and quickly.
Following on from the spread of germs we talked about how to wash our hands which we are actually quite good at now!! But why do we use soap? We had some germs (pepper) in the water and dipped our finger in without any soap on. The germs stuck to our finger. We then put soap on our finger and dipped it into the germs. The germs moved away from our finger because they don't like the slippery soap. So wash your hands with soap.
Maths - creating block graphs
We investigated ways of representing data. We decided that block graphs are an easier way to look at data.
Karate taster lesson
We had great fun learning some karate moves with Simon from Simoncoope Karate school.
Measuring weight
We had a fun two maths lessons carrying out some weighing activities. We used balance scales to find things that weighed 30g, 40g, and 50g. We used the dial scales to estimate then weigh the bags of marbles.
Multiskills
We went on a bus to the Hermitage Leisure Centre to take part in a multiskills afternoon organised by the School Sports Partnership. We had great fun developing our sporting skills.
Bouncing fun
The first day of our new topic was a lot of bouncing fun! We also learnt how our heart and lungs work by taking our pulse before and after bouncing.
Bouncing maths
We used the bouncers and timed ourselves to see how many bounces we could do in 1 minute. We also measured out 2m, 4m and 6m and counted how many bounces it took to travel these distances.
Autumn 1 2021
We hope you have all had a lovely summer break and ready to get back to work. Our topic this term is 'Street Detective' which is full of fun activities. We will be taking a walk around the local area using maps to navigate ourselves. We might be able to visit the library and give you all a chance to become members if you haven't already.
HOMEWORK IDEAS
The Great Fire of London
We had a great afternoon with Tom from Partake acting out the events in the Great Fire of London. We all know so many facts about the events that happened.
Science - Investigative work
We have been looking at the suitability of materials for different jobs. In this investigation we were finding out which materials were waterproof.
ICT
We have been using the lap tops to learn how to type in sentences using different functions on the key board. We can also change the size, colour and text style of our work. We have also learnt how to insert pictures.
ART
We used charcoal to sketch our houses from the time of the Great Fire of London. We looked carefully at houses from this time and tried to include the detail in our drawings.
Design and technology
Using our charcoal sketches we made a 3D house from the Great Fire of London. Some of us managed to create doors and windows that opened.
English
We are trying hard to write verbs using the correct tense. Our classroom poster is helping us to write correctly in the past and present tense.
ICT e-safety
We have been discussing how to keep ourselves safe when we use the internet. We know not to share our personal information with anyone. Click on the link below to watch the cartoon.
History
We have been comparing old and new shops as part of our topic. In the 'old days' they didn't have a Morrisons you had to go to lots of different shops for your food.
How has our local area changed over 100 years?
We compared these two maps of our local area. Over 100 years ago our school was a field!
"My house wasn't built a 100 years ago!"
"The school wasn't here 100 years ago!"
"Agar Nook wasn't built a 100 years ago!"
Science
We have been investigating the suitability of different materials to make bridges. We discovered that metal made a rigid bridge but the plastic was bendy. We worked in groups to make newspaper as rigid as possible. Some of us managed to put 400g on our newspaper bridge!
Maths
We have been exploring 3D shapes. We tried to make 3D shapes and used 3D shapes to make models. We could name the 3D shapes we made and used. Can you identify a cone, sphere, cylinder, cube, cuboid, triangular prism and pyramid?
Learning walk
We started our Street detective topic with a walk around the local area. We looked at different types of houses, physical features and human features.
Science - sorting and grouping work
We have been talking about things that are living, not living any more and never lived. We went outside to find examples of these ideas. Can you identify things that are not living anymore?
Science - What do seeds need to grow?
To find the answer to this question we planted some cress seeds and put them in different places to see if they would grow. Our results were amazing. We were very surprised to see the seeds that were put in the fridge with water had grown a little a bit but were yellow! The seeds that were put in the dark with water grew but were also yellow! The best growth were the ones we put in the sunlight with water. Some of us had never tried cress before and we really liked it - well most of us!
Geography - locating RNLI stations
We used a map of the UK to locate some of the lifeboat stations on our coastline.
Science investigation - Will it degrade?
We have been finding out about living and not living materials. We also talked about the pollution in the Worlds oceans and the type of materials that are dumped in them. In our investigation we put different materials into salty water to represent the sea. We will shake our bottles 20 times every day for the waves. After 5 weeks of observing we will see if living or non living materials will degrade.
Science
We brought our 5 week science investigation to an end. 5 weeks ago we placed different materials into salty water (the sea) to see if they would degrade over time. Every week we have been making observations and every day we shook our bottles 20 times to simulate the waves. We emptied our materials onto paper towels and used magnifying glasses to make our final observations and conclusions.
"The metal paper clip has started to go to rusty."
"The paper straw has started to degrade."
"The plastic bag has not degraded at all."
Geography
We have been looking at coastal features and deciding if they are human or physical features.
