Welcome to Jellyfish Class (Year 2)

 

 

             

  Mrs Zalman (Class Teacher)               Mrs England (Teaching Assistant) 

          

     Mrs Beagle (Thursday afternoons)   Mrs Gregg (Special Needs Assistant)

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

Important Class Information

• Our PE days are Wednesdays 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. Books 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 planners. Dojo points will be awarded for reading and taken away for not reading enough.
• Spelling tests are on a Monday.

Our Learning

This is what our week looks like in Jellyfish class:

Our class learning

February

This month, we have been finishing our topic on clay pots and Clarice Cliff. We practised adding patterns to clay with different equipment, making pinch pots and slab pots. We then chose which one we wanted to make and added our patterns to the outside. When they were dry, we painted them to match our patterns and then glazed them with glue to make them shiny. They all looked amazing!

  

In Geography, we have just started our new topic on Our Wonderful World. For this, we looked at Google Earth and put the continents back together with labels in big jigsaws.

In Literacy, we have been working on fact files about oceans. We have looked at headings, subheadings and fact boxes and how they help to organise a text. We had some cut up fact files that we needed to order and then used all of our knowledge on this to write our own.

January

This month, we have started a lot of new topics. In History, we have started learning about The Great Fire of London. We have learned about how it started in the Bakery and caused a lot of destruction! We have learnt so much that we even did our class assembly on it! Thank you to the parents who helped their children create cardboard houses for our fire recreation. We absolutely loved setting fire to them in the playground because we really got to see how quickly fire can spread.

In Art, our new topic is Clarice Cliff and clay work. We used clay to practice creating a pinch pot and a slab pot and then decided which one to do for our final piece. We made clay tiles and practised using different tools to make different patterns. We then used these tools to make patterns in our final pots.

   

   

In Literacy, we have been reading and writing about Flat Stanley, focusing on using different conjunctions to make our writing sound nicer. We have now moved onto writing diaries, starting with pretending we have seen the Great Fire of London. Now we are looking at using adverbs to make our writing sound exciting.

December

This month, we have been doing some nice Christmas activities. We have been very lucky because we were able to visit the local church and look at their beautiful nativity scene. We also looked for different Christmas symbols around the church and their tree.

We also went to see the panto in Woking theatre and all had an amazing time!

In Science, we have been learning about materials and their properties and sorted different materials into how we could dispose of them. We talked about recycling and what happens to the things we recycle.

In DT, we finished our vehicles projects by designing, building and evaluating our own vehicles. We focused on using moving wheels and axles and thought carefully about how to attach them to the chassis.

 

In Literacy, we are writing sets of instructions. We found out that we need to make sure our instructions are very clear otherwise they might not go right! We wrote our own set of instructions about making a pizza, an ice cream sundae or a fruit salad.

November

This month, we have started all of our new topics. The children started off their Geography topic of Kenya by creating drawings or models of African animals at home. We were very impressed with them all! In class, we have been looking at lots of different maps of Kenya and made our own with our own labels for the different features. We have also been exploring Kenya through lots of different aerial photographs.

In Literacy, we have been working on coordinating conjunctions. Our book at the moment is Giraffes can’t dance and we are doing lots of writing about different African animals.

In DT, we have started our new topic on wheels and axles. We have explored different types of vehicles and how they are used. We looked specifically at their wheels and axles and how and where they were positioned. We then used lots of different resources to practise making our own sets of wheels of axles ahead of our final piece: a moving vehicle.

   

October

This month, we have been finishing off lots of our topics. As a brilliant end to our History topic, we went on our trip to Brooklands Museum. We saw lots of planes including Concorde, parts of a Wellington Bomber and we even got to go on the plane of a Sultan! We had a tour of the different cars, including antique cars with no steering wheels and McLaren racing cars! We clocked in to our shift at the aircraft factory and went round completing different jobs (carpentry for joins, fabric shop for testing materials and the tinsmith for making model planes). The children remembered lots of facts from our lessons and were able to ask and answer lots of questions.

 

We have been learning about question marks and exclamation marks in Literacy and have been using them in our writing about Hansel and Gretel. We then write our own stories based on finding a magical place that was a trick.

For International week, we were learning about Germany. We wrote postcards about an imaginary visit to a famous German landmark and then draw beautiful pictures of them. We made delicious gingerbread men were we measured the ingredients, rolled the dough, cut the gingerbread men and decorated them.

   

September

It has been a great start to Year 2 this month! The children have adjusted well to the fast pace and high expectations!

In Literacy, we have been reading Hairy MacLary’s Rumpus at the Vets and rewriting the story. We ordered the events to see how much we could remember. We have changed the animals and how they caused chaos and then used the theme of chaos to write our own stories about either a farm or a zoo. Our grammar focus has been on expanded noun phrases with the children coming up with amazing adjectives!

 

In Art, we are learning about Paul Klee and have been copying and evaluating his paintings. We used white paint to make tints of colours to try and match to one of his paintings.

   

In Science, we are learning about animals, including humans. So far, we have talked about the different animal groups, life cycles of different animals (frogs, butterflies and ducks) and then skills learnt at different stages of the human life cycle.

For our Maths learning, we have been working on place value by identifying tens and ones shown in different ways. We have used place value charts, part-part-whole models, base 10, bundles of straws and ten frames.