By Sophie Dale16th March 2023

In Art this term in Year 1 we have been studying how different colours make you feel before moving on to Pop Art and the work of Andy Warhol.

We started the topic by exploring primary and secondary colours we read the book ‘The colour Monster’ and discussed the feelings linked to each colour. The children identified that warm colours are associated with happiness and love and that some cool colours can be associated with feeling calm or sad. The children then produced 2 rainbows, one made up from a warm colour palette and one from a cool palette.

The following week we explored colours further, we initially identified the 3 primary colours then had a go at mixing our own secondary colours. We then produced some fabulous artwork using various paintbrushes to make different sized lines and patterns.

We then moved on to exploring who Andy Warhol is and what he was famous for. We learnt about the Pop Art genre and discussed the bright colours used within the paintings and prints.

We set up an art gallery in the classroom and the children were asked to identify which of the images were Andy Warhol’s artwork and explain why.

Following this the children then had a go at sketching and painting Andy Warhol’s famous Banana masterpiece. The children really enjoyed doing this and the results were great!

We then built up our final masterpiece over the next lessons, the children sketched modes of transport in an ‘Andy Warhol style’ before photocopying these 4 times. The children assembled the pictures together and painted 2 using the warm colour palettes and 2 using the cool colour palettes previously explored.

The results were incredible and the paintings have taken pride of place within the classroom!

Science Week – Year 2

By Miss A STOCKTON14th March 2023

On Monday, we invited our parents and adults in to work with us whilst we completed our Science investigation!

We are working on Materials and their Properties – and we wanted to test if the shape of a paper bridge affected how much weight it could hold.

First we made a prediction and planned how we would fold and make our paper bridges. Lots of us predicted that the thicker the bridge, the more weight the bridge would hold.

We then tested our bridges with the weight of pennies. If the bridge collapsed when holding only a few pennies, then it wasn’t strong enough.

We had such a lovely afternoon working with our adults and discussing our methods and conclusions.

What makes you feel relaxed?

By Miss P STATHERS27th February 2023

Year 2 have be learning about being relaxed. We thought about things that make us feel stressed and things that make us feel relaxed.

 

In groups, we looked at different scenarios and ordered them from most relaxing to least relaxing. Then we discussed ways we like to relax both at home and at school.

Charlotte Eldred

By Mrs K SMITH24th February 2023

Year 2 were incredibly lucky this week to have a visit from local artist Charlotte Eldred.

Charlotte told us all about her job as an artist and about the art she creates as well as all the amazing people she has taught.

Charlotte knew Year 2 were looking at the work of Julian Opie and she created a fantastic bespoke lesson for us based on his artworks.

We began by having a doodle session. Charlotte told us how this can help us feel calm. We used black pens and created lots of different patterns. Our doodles included lines, swirls, circles, zig zags, dots and dashes to name a few. We kept using different patterns until our paper was filled.

We then moved onto creating our own characters with our pens plain paper.

Charlotte helped us create characters step by step. We started with a round face before we added detail such as hair and facial features. We were able to draw on our own artistic skills that we have been practising when we have created self portraits.

We followed Charlotte’s instructions really well and created different characters, some with long hair and big noses, others with short hair and small eyes. We really loved being artistic and creating work we were proud of.

We loved our session with Charlotte and spent time afterwards looking at her website and all the amazing artwork she has created. We can’t wait to use the skills Charlotte has taught us and create some of our own doodles and artwork.

Year 2 Science – Materials – Which materials will block the light the best?

By Miss A STOCKTON22nd February 2023

Year 2 children are looking at materials and their uses.

Today we investigated which material would be the best at blocking out the light.

We made a prediction then used a torch to shine through each material. We used the words ‘opaque’ and ‘transparent’ to compare the different materials.

 

We found the the black paper was opaque and the plastic lid was the most transparent.

Year 2 History – Enquiry 2 – Who was Samuel Pepys and why were his diaries significant?

By Miss A STOCKTON21st February 2023

Year 2 looked at extracts from Samuel Pepys’s diary.

They looked at his writing about ‘The Great Fire of London’ and thought about what he must have felt at that time.

Children then looked at the interned to research Samuel Pepys further.

They worked extremely hard to create a fact filr for Samuel Pepys. They found his life very interesting and couldn’t believe that he buried his expensive wine and cheese in his garden!

Year 2 RE – Is it important for everyone to believe in something?

By Miss A STOCKTON20th February 2023

Year 2 have been looking at famous people and what they are committed to.

They looked at Mo Farrah, Greta Thunberg, Sir Tom Moore and Marcus Rashford and discussed what they were committed to. What did they want to improve? What did they believe in?

Children then thought about what our school could be committed to. What is important to work on to make our school be the best place it can be?

Children worked in teams to think of some fantastic ideas.

library

By Mrs K SMITH10th February 2023

Miss Stathers’ class were very excited to end the half term with a trip to the school library. 

We had the opportunity to spend time looking at the amazing books and we even had chance to read some.

Some of us read books to ourselves, some of us read books to each other and some of us shared books and read them together.

There is so many books to choose from we had to choose carefully.

We looked at the illustrations on the front of the book and read the blurb on the back to help us decide which ones we wanted to read.

At the end of the afternoon Mrs Smith read us a story. She read ‘Stick Man’ because it was one of her girls favourite books when they were little. We were all really happy when Stick man finally got home.

There were so many books to choose from we can’t wait to go back!

Orchestra song

By Mrs K SMITH10th February 2023

This week in music Year 2 have discovered lots of different instruments through our new song.

Our new song this week is called ‘Orchestra Song’

We began by appraising our new song. Orchestra Song made us feel very relaxed, the rhythm was much slower than our last songs and this made us feel calm.

Listening to the song we heard lots of different instruments names so we had a look at these and talked about the sounds they made. We really liked the oboes and bassoons. These were new instruments to us.

We got to perform our new song to each other at the end of the lesson. We found this a little harder this week as there were so many new names of instruments that we were trying to sing. We really enjoyed finding out about them all though and can’t wait to play some of them when we are older.

Programming in Year 2

By Amy JEFFREY10th February 2023

In our final lessons on Robot algorithms, we designed, created, and tested a mat for a floor robot. This was to introduce the idea that design in programming not only includes code and algorithms, but also artefacts related to the project, such as artwork.

Once our mats were finalised we created algorithms to get our robot from a start point to an end point. When we were able to do this confidently, we introduced obstacles to see if we could still successfully get our floor robot to our chosen end points. Then we recorded our algorithm in written form.