Welcome to Jellyfish Class (Year 2)

 

 

                  

        Mrs Zalman (Class Teacher)        Mrs England (Teaching Assistant)   Mrs Beagle (Thursday afternoons)

If you have any questions or need to contact us, please send any emails to: jellyfish@maybury.surrey.sch.uk

Important Class Information

OUR CLASS ASSEMBLY IS ON MONDAY 10TH JUNE AT 2:45. PARENTS ARE WELCOME TO COME.

• The slides from the parent welcome meeting can be found at the bottom of this page.
• I have added a document to show what topics we are covering this half term.
• Our PE days are Mondays and Fridays. Children must wear PE kit on these days.
• Home learning will be pages in the CGP books and will be posted in the Jellyfish Home Learning section. Book go out on a Tuesday and should be brought back in on the following Monday.
• Reading must be completed at least 3 times a week with a comment in the reading diaries.
• Spelling tests are on a Monday.

Our Learning

This is what our week looks like in Jellyfish class:

May

We have been finishing off our current topics with some very exciting activities in Jellyfish Class.

In Science, we visited Painshill Park for some minibeast hunting! We shook bushes over blankets, ran through grass with big nets, turned over logs and explored the Crystal Grotto. Everyone had a great day and we saw lots of interesting minibeasts.

     

   

In Computing, we have continued our work on photography by looking at framing to make sure everything we want to be in the picture is in it, We then edited our photos using Pixlr to change the colours!

       

In our Literacy lessons, we have been looking at using varied sentence starters to make our writing sound nicer. First, we used them in explanation texts about life cycles. We had to use ordering and time starters like first, next, then, after that. We then moved onto using varied sentence starters in stories, for example, one sunny day, several months later, in the blink of an eye, Now that we know all of these different ways to start sentences, we don’t need to use ‘then’ so much in our writing!

 

April

This month in Jellyfish class, we have started lots of new topics. We have been reading Meerkat Mail and have received postcards from Sunny the Meerkat. He visited our classroom and caused lots of trouble! We have been using his postcards to learn about writing in past tense and have been writing our own postcards back to him to tell him off! We have been working hard on recognising verbs and especially on irregular verbs (verbs that don’t follow the –ed pattern).

    

In Maths, we have been revising fractions. We practised finding fractions of shapes and then of numbers where we used bar models and arrays to work out the questions. We also ordered fractions by looking at their numerators.

In Science, our Living things and their habitats unit has been very exciting! We have done lots of outdoor searches for living things in different types of habitats in our school. We looked at local habitats along the fences for different living things and then we looked at microhabitats for minibeasts.

     

March

This month, we have been doing lots of creative lessons. In Computing, we have designed and tested our own beebot mats where we planned an algorithm and then debugged it and tested it again. We have been working on using sets of instructions for the robots to follow and making them as clear as possible.

In DT, we finished building our shelters after designing them to be stable and strong. We learnt that triangles are the best shape to use and we need a strong, thick base for our shelter to stand on. We then tested their strength, stability and whether they were free standing. We poured water over the top to test if they were waterproof!

         

In R.E, we have been learning about Easter and the theme of Rescue. We then used real Easter gardens as inspiration for creating our own versions.

In Literacy, we have been learning about fact files. We did some research about Antarctica and gathered information for our own fact files. We then organised them into sections and used subheadings to make our writing organised.

February

This month, Jellyfish have been finishing off their clay pots with painting and glazing. We evaluated them by discussing what we thought went well, what we didn’t like about them and what we would do differently next time. The children added metallic paint as an extra layer too.

                                              

                          

In Literacy, we are reading Lost and Found and our writing is focusing on using different types of punctuation. The children have been practising writing statements and commands to use full stops, asking questions to use question marks and using exclamations so they can include exclamation marks. We are rewriting the story and then making changes to make it our own version.

                                                                     

In Maths, we were looking at fractions. We started with fractions of shapes and moved onto fractions of numbers using our dividing methods. We have learnt about halves, quarters and thirds and can identify unit and non-unit fractions.

We have started our new geography topic this half term where we are learning about our Wonderful World. We looked at Google Earth and aerial maps to compare the oceans to the continents and labelled these on maps. We located the United Kingdom and Africa too(from our previous topic!).

January

This month, Jellyfish have been learning about Clarice Cliff in Art and used her work with pottery as inspiration for our own. We practised printing and incising to make patterns on a clay tile. We then made a pinch pot or a slab pot and used our patterns on these too. When they are dry, we are going to paint them and glaze them!

     

In Literacy and History, we have been looking at the Great Fire of London. We have read some diaries about it happening and even wrote our own, pretending to be Samuel Pepys—the write of a famous diary all about the fire!

In Computing, we have been collecting data about different things and putting it into tally charts. We then make a pictogram on the chromebooks using this data and can even answer questions about what we can see.

We have also been practising our skills with the glockenspiels and have been working on our improvising (thinking of our own musical pieces) and composing (writing our own musical pieces).

December

This month has been very exciting for Jellyfish class—we have visited the church to see how most Christians celebrate Christmas, we walked into Woking town to watch the panto, Let’s read came and gave us all brand new books to read and we also won the attendance award so got to see a magic show too!

In our learning we have been researching, designing and building our own vehicles, focusing on wheels, axles and chassis. We then evaluated our vehicles and discussed what we had to do for our wheels to be able to move.

   

In maths, we have been looking at multiplying and dividing. We practised drawing to help us work out the answers and have also been working them out by counting in our heads. For dividing, we used resources and drew pictures to show our sharing across groups.

For Literacy, we have been writing instructions and trying to make sure they are clear and in the right order. We then wrote our own instructions for making fruit salad, pizza or an ice cream sundae.

November

This month, Jellyfish have been doing lots of exciting learning in all of our subjects. We were visited by the Life Space and had to help Harold the Giraffe solve some of his friendship problems. We learnt all about what our body needs to stay healthy and about the different organs that help us stay healthy too.

In DT, we are looking at how wheels and axles work. We have been exploring different vehicles and how their features help them do specific jobs. We experimented with different resources to make our own wheels and axles and learnt what works well and what doesn’t. Then we designed our own vehicle and are looking forward to making them!

For maths, we have been learning about multiplication, We started by making equal groups of resources and then arranging them neatly to they are easier to count. We talked about multiplication as ‘groups of’ and then as repeated addition sentences. Once we understood these well, we moved onto using the multiplication symbol in our number sentences.

We were also really lucky to have been able to visit Woking library and explore their amazing children’s section!

October

Jellyfish class have had an exciting month this month. We went on a school trip to Brooklands museum and got to see the race track that we have been learning about in History. We saw some of the old racing cars and motorbikes there and some of us even got to sit in a motorbike side car! We also saw some Wellington Bombers that were built in the race track buildings during World War Two. We finished off our topic by writing a recount of the day and the children remembered so many wonderful facts!

  

In maths, we have been learning about money. We identified the coins and used them to make different amounts.

To start off our learning for International week, we have been looking at lots of German cities, castles and art. We decorated our own wooden hearts, following similar patterns that we have seen in the German examples.

 

September 

We have had a busy start to Year 2 in Jellyfish!  All of the children have settled in really well and have been doing lots of lovely learning.

For maths, we have been practising using our place value knowledge to solve different problems. We have used base 10 to show how numbers are made up of tens and ones and then have used part-part-whole models to show this too.

     

In Literacy, we have been reading Hairy Maclary and the Rumpus at the vets. We used ideas from this story to write our own about different animals we might see at the vets and then a new story about a rumpus at the zoo or farmyard. Out focus has been on using lots of different adjectives so we have had lots of lessons thinking of as many as we can for each of the animals in our stories.

For our Computing learning, we are looking at what IT is and where it can be found. We also used google classroom to complete some sorting activities where we needed to resize some pictures before sorting them into what we use them for.