Week 5
The children did themselves proud at the Kingswood residential. Great team work, communication and maturity were on display as we took part in activities such as aeroball, bouldering and nightline. For Mrs Chetcuti, Miss Edge and myself it was an absolute pleasure to watch the children grow in confidence and become more independent in new surroundings during our 2 day stay. We will post more photos soon!
This term in PE, we have been learning Gymnastics and Invasion games. In gymnastics we had our first experience using the climbing frame in the hall! The children loved it! Our first task was for the children to think of safety rules to follow whilst using the equipment. The children were fantastic and used the frame very sensibly.
We also revised the 5 gymnastic shapes we had learned in year 1 and added a sixth; back support.
One warm-up game we played fostered working with a partner and practising balances. One person followed another around the hall whilst staying in contact. When the whistle blew the front person needed to touch the mat and balance on the specified body part.
We discussed tensing muscles in order to hold a balance still. We practised this by one person holding a star shape whilst their partner tried to push down their arms. Great strength conditioning!
Next it was time to try balancing whilst tensing muscles in order to hold still.
Gymnastics is our Friday PE lesson. On Mondays we are learning all about Invasion games. Our first lesson was to understand what being in possession means and support a teammate to do this. We spent two lessons practising keeping the ball close to our bodies to keep possession and making sure we look up and around to see our teammates, space and any defenders. The lovely thing about these lessons is that children were learning to socially progress by communicating well with a teammate to keep possession of the ball, emotionally develop by showing empathy for teammates to give them time to succeed and develop thinking skills by using creativity to keep possession of the ball.
Week 4
As part of our 'Land Ahoy' topic, we sailed to Jamaica and learned about some of the famous Jamaicans who have had a lasting influence in Great Britain. One of the most famous Jamaicans was Bob Marley who had a small but far reaching discography. We learned to play 'Three Little Birds' on recorders and glockenspiels/xylophones.
Year 2 Smartest Giants Playing 'Three Little Birds' by Bob Marley
The children worked in pairs. Here is one version with one partner playing the recorder and the other playing a glockenspiel or xylophone.
Year 2 Smartest Giants Playing 'Three Little Birds' by Bob Marley version 2
This is the second version where the partners switch who is playing the recorder and who is playing the glockenspiel or xylophone. Which version do you prefer?
Today in maths we linked with our Land Ahoy topic and took a stand against plastic pollution. Here are the Year 2s carefully collecting various forms of litter, collecting the data on a tally chart and then later we presented the data in bar chart form.
Week 3
Year 2 Giants Pirate Sea Shanty
This week the children learned a pirate sea shanty using actions to help them remember the words.
Week 2
The Giants did an excellent job making a piece of turtle art. We researched about these incredible creatures and travelled to Malaysia, Tobago and Australia on our Land Ahoy ship. The giants used a range of techniques and media such as water colours, clay pastels and pencil.
Here are the Star Group's final draft of their octopus "article" for National Geographic Kids magazine. The children brilliantly researched, discussed, planned, drafted, edited and improved their writing.
Week 1
The Giants did a skilful job coding today. We did traditional coding by creating algorithms to guide Bee Bots on our ipads but also worked as a group to teach an A.I. robot to correctly identify litter to collect in the ocean. This form of coding is called "Machine Learning".