Welcome back to all our Year two pupils and families! We hope you thoroughly enjoyed the Easter holidays; we know the children did from their many stories of adventures they have had.
As usual, we began the week with our Mindful Monday lesson. Our Artist this term is Edgar Degas whose main focus in his paintings are people and figures. So, we started the week with a whole class follow along to sketching a person’s figure. We had to use our light sketching lines and think about the proportions of the body parts. Lots of us found it funny when our teacher drew a figure with a large head and tiny hands, observing how the figure was not in proportion! This helped us when we began our own drawings.
On Mondays our focus for assembly is diversity. This week we had a visit from our local Rabbi who told us all about the festival of Passover. We enjoyed learning about the story of Moses and the Pharaoh and were encouraged to be active participants by being Pharaoh’s voice “No, no no, I will not let you go!” The children had the opportunity to try matzah bread at the end of assembly and some shared their own experiences of celebrating Passover too:
We have also been super busy with our Geography learning. Our topic this term is about a non-European country! We have been learning about the continent of Africa, in particular the country Kenya. We began by learning some key facts about Kenya, and designed boarding passes with some key information.
Maths, maths and more maths! Wow we have been busy mathematicians this week! We sliced into fractions and begun to dabble in multiplication. We have been focusing a lot on equal and unequal groups. This has really supported us in our fraction lessons to understand that when we find a fraction of an amount the amount needs to be shared equally into groups. We have learnt about the numerator and the denominator, further understanding how this helps us to find a fraction of an amount. Take a look at the teacher example and some work below:
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- Teacher model
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- Equal or Unequal groups
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- Fractions of amounts
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- Fractions of amounts
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- Fractions of amounts
How to help at home
- Take some chalk outside, lie down and draw around your figure! What do you notice? Are the arms always longer than the hips?
- Investigate the culture of Kenya. You could visit a local library and take out some books to learn more about the country.
- Practice, practice, practice. Encourage your child to use fractions when cutting up food eg:- a pizza or a cake. Moving them on, can your child recall how to find 1/2, 1/3 or 1/4 of a number? Give them a question like, what is 1/3 of 15? Remind them to use their sharing circles and share equally.