What a wonderful start to Whale Class we have had! 

English
We explored two wonderful stories — The Snail and the Whale and Dear Greenpeace. We learned how to write clear, coherent sentences and used adjectives and nouns to create character descriptions for the snail and setting descriptions for the many places the snail and the whale visited. Inspired by Dear Greenpeace, we wrote our own letters and even researched different endangered animals, sharing our findings with the class. We also practised using conjunctions to add extra detail to our writing. Everyone has been working incredibly hard on their handwriting, and we were so proud to win the Presentation Pride Cup!

Maths
In Maths, we completed our learning on place value. We practised counting forwards and backwards from any given number and learned to recognise the tens and ones in two-digit numbers. This knowledge has really helped us as we begin our new unit on addition!

Geography
Our Geography topic took us on a journey around the world! We explored the seven continents and the oceans that lie between them, discovering that Asia is the largest continent and the Pacific is the biggest ocean. We also learned to identify human and physical features in different continents and loved using atlases to locate places around the world.

RE (Religious Education)
In RE, we’ve been learning about why Jewish families celebrate Shabbat. We created timelines to show the key events of Shabbat and now know that it begins at sunset on Friday and lasts for 25 hours. We even recreated a Shabbat meal and enjoyed tasting challah bread and grape juice!

Design & Technology (DT)
In DT, we became engineers and created our own moving mechanisms — Ferris wheels! We investigated how axles and wheels work, looked at real-life examples, designed our own Ferris wheels, and carefully selected materials to bring our designs to life. Our Ferris wheels needed to spin and hold at least six people — we had so much fun making them!

Science

In Science, we’ve been taking our learning outdoors to explore microhabitats and the minibeasts that live within them!

We began by learning how to classify things as living, dead, or never alive, discovering that living things can move, breathe, grow, reproduce, and produce waste.

Next, we explored the different microhabitats around our school grounds, collecting data on the number and types of minibeasts we found. The children then presented their findings in colourful bar charts, showing off their growing data-handling skills.

To investigate further, we created our own choice chambers — boxes with four different conditions: light and dry, light and damp, dark and dry, and dark and damp. After carefully collecting some minibeasts, the children observed which environments the creatures preferred and discussed why.

The children were fantastic at spotting and identifying minibeasts, and they showed great care and respect for the tiny creatures throughout the investigation. What a brilliant example of curiosity and kindness in action!

We’ve had lots to celebrate this half term, including Space Week, Black History Month, Diwali, and Harvest. We enjoyed bringing in food donations for Father Andrew and creating beautiful diva lamps for Diwali.

It’s been a fantastic start to Year 2 — everyone has settled in so well, and we can’t wait to see where the rest of the year takes us!