Emmaville Primary School

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Wales Year 2

Welcome to the Wales Year 2 Class Page.  Here, you can find out about everything that we've been doing this year.
Friday 21st May
 
This week in PE, we have continued our unit on athletics. In previous weeks, we have focused on our running technique and this week, it was the turn of jumping. We started by watching a video of the long jump, and discussed the technique we would use, using not just our legs, but our arms and hips to propel us forwards. When we went outside, we played a range of games to practise this technique, before having a go at measuring how far we could jump. 
Friday 14th May
 
This week in history, we learnt all about David Attenborough. We started the session with a fact finding activity where the children had to read different fact cards in order to build a fact file on his life. We then really enjoyed watching some clips from Frozen Planet and admired what Sir David Attenborough had done to raise awareness of our natural world and how we can help protect it.
 
After that, we took inspiration from David Attenborough and worked in groups to research an animal of our choice before writing and filming our very own wildlife documentaries! A busy afternoon indeed, but a very enjoyable one! Check out some of our documentaries below. 

Friday 7th May
 
We have had another great week in Wales class, learning about all sorts of exciting things. We loved learning all about the continent of Antarctica in Geography, practising our times tables on Doodle Maths and writing some wonderful "rags to riches" stories in English. We also have been thinking carefully about how to improve and edit our writing using our brand new purple polishing pens. 
 
As well as all of these exciting things, a real highlight of our week was our DT lesson. We have been learning all about moving vehicles, and identifying wheels, axles and axle holders. We were set a challenge to see if we could experiment with different materials and joins to create our own template of a moving vehicle. I was so impressed with the growth mindset shown by the children; a really enjoyable session all round. 
Friday 30th April
 
This week in science, we have loved learning all about animals including humans. We have explored how animals change as they grow, and what they can do at different stages in their lives. We had lots of fun looking at pictures of young animals and guessing what they would be as they grow. We then tried hard to use scientific language to describe these changes. 
Friday 23rd April
 
It has been so lovely to hear about all of the adventures that the children have been up to over the Easter holidays as restrictions slowly start to lift. They have certainly come back to school with a spring in their step and an eagerness to learn. I am looking forward to seeing what we can achieve in this final term of Year 2.
 
The children really impressed me during our Jigsaw session this week, where we were discussing family. The children showed great maturity as they explored different relationships and recognised what our families do for us. It was a really heartwarming session, and great empathy and understanding was shown throughout.
Friday 2nd April
 
What a way to finish a lovely period of time back in school. This week, we have completed lots of activities linked to Easter. We learnt all about the Christian festival of Easter, and thought about what the crucifixion meant to Christians. We also learnt about Easter traditions in different countries around the world, and had some Easter fun of our own when we decorated hard boiled egg, and completed an Easter egg hunt in the school grounds organised brilliantly by the School Council, Miss Kenyon, and of course, the Easter bunny!
 
 
Friday 26th March
 
Another brilliant week in Wales class; it is genuinely a pleasure to watch as the children learn, laugh and have fun at school. 
 
We have completed some more super English work, inspired by some exciting tailed visitors to the classroom; this sparked much enthusiasm as the children found more and more clues, and spotted more dragons everywhere they went. I think the residents of Crawcrook need to keep their eyes peeled as they seem to be everywhere!
 
We were also very lucky to take part in a Zoom workshop on Tuesday morning with two members of staff from Baltic. We had so much fun learning all about sculpture, looking at different artwork and also taking part in lots of drama and quiz activities.  We were then left with a challenge to create our own sculptures just using paper. I was blown away with the children's creativity and the different ideas they came up with!
Finally, we really enjoyed our computing lesson this week, where we learnt to use Scratch Jr. We selected different sprite characters, changed backgrounds and inputted blocks of code to make the characters do different things. Not only was I impressed with the children's computing ability, but also the way they worked together with their learning partner. 
Friday 19th March
 
 
What another great week we have had in Wales class! I am truly blown away with the attitude the children have shown to their learning. In English, we have been focusing on a short film called Taking Flight. 
We explored the characters in the video in detail, and on Tuesday, we had a go at writing kenning poems. Kennings are poems in which every line is only two words long, and give clues as to what the subject of the poem is. We wrote one about a Grandad, like the Grandad in the story. Here it is:

 

Grandad

Biscuit eater,

TV watcher,

Joyful adventurer,

Settee snoozer,

Sweet giver,

Golf player,

Smile giver,

Bad joke teller,

Food pincher,

Love spreader.

Friday 12th March
 
What a lovely week we have had in school. It has been so nice to see the whole school community back together where we belong. I have been so impressed with the way in which Wales class have settled straight back into school life, and it has been so lovely to watch them chat, laugh and play with all of their friends. This week has been predominantly based around wellbeing activities, allowing the children to have time to reflect on the strange time we have been living through. We have talked about the things we have missed, but also spent a lot of time talking about those things we are looking forward to doing; the dreams we have for the (hopefully) not too distant future. We created beautiful dream catchers to help catch any bad dreams we may have, and to help us focus on the positive things ahead. 
Friday 27th November
 
It has been so lovely to have a full week back in school. Wales class have worked hard this week in all subject areas. We have learnt how to add two 2-digit numbers, how to write instructions, what it is like in London and how it is different to Newcastle as well as lots more. On Tuesday afternoon. we had a special treat because we took part in a virtual workshop organised by Seven Stories with author Chitra Soundar. She joined us all of the way from India, and told us about the process of writing stories, as well as answering some questions we had. We learnt lots, and showed great listening skills throughout!
Friday 13th November
 
Wow Year 2 - being in isolation doesn't stop us when it comes to working hard, and being general superstars. The work I have received through Seesaw this week has been amazing, and you have made me a very proud teacher! Although there has been all sorts completed at home, one of the highlights has to be your entries into the Emmaville Children in Need bake-off! See the video below for pictures of the wonderful tasty treats. 

Friday 23rd October 
 
We have had such a lovely Autumnal week in Wales class. We thought about the sights, smells and tastes of Autumn and used these to write acrostic poems. We also had lots of fun collecting beautiful Autumn leaves and looking carefully at the different shapes and colours. We used these to make the most fabulous Autumn crowns!
Friday 16th October
 
Another thoroughly enjoyable week in Wales class. I can't believe we only have one week left before half term; as the saying goes, time flies when you are having fun. This week we started a new unit in PE focusing on football. The first lesson involved practising dribbling skills to effectively move with the ball. We played different games to help reinforce this skill, but our favourite was Robin Hood where you had to steal footballs from the rich teams! We had lots of laughs and fun, and you can see from the pictures below that the children showed their "game faces"! 
In our History lessons, we spend time learning about famous people and events from the past. This week, we learnt all about Francis Drake. We discovered that he was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world. We also learnt all about his relationship with the Spanish, and how he stole lots of gold and silver from them to become a very rich man! We learnt that King Philip II of Spain was not happy with this and organised a huge fleet of ships to be sent over to Britain, known as the Spanish Armada. I was so impressed with the questions asked by the children, showing what inquisitive historians we have in Wales class. We then put our DT skills into practise to create moving mechanisms to depict Francis Drake's ship - The Golden Hind - circumnavigating the world. A great history lesson had by all!
Friday 9th October
 
This week, we have had lots of fun creating our own superheroes and thinking about exciting adventures they could go on as we innovated our class text. After working really hard to write our stories, we then talked about the importance of proof reading and editing our work. We used our special proof reading spectacles to help focus our eyes to spot any little mistakes we may have made, and then fixed these. This is quite a tricky task, but I was so impressed with the wonderful Year 2s. Great work once again Wales. 
Friday 2nd October
 
Another great week in Wales class. I have been so impressed with the way all of the children have got back into the swing of busy days at school, and their skills are blowing me away. In English, we have enjoyed starting a new unit based on Mini Grey's book, Traction Man, and have had lots of fun creating our own superheroes. In maths, we have spent a lot of time thinking about place value and numbers up to 100. We have been partitioning numbers and thinking carefully about how many tens and how many ones are needed to make different numbers. You can see us working hard with our work partners here. 
In History, we have been carrying out a local history study. We learnt that our local area is well known for its coal mining history, and looked at a map of our local area and the location of different coal mines. We looked at pictures, and read first hand accounts about what it would have been like to work in a coal mine. We looked carefully at Emma Colliery, Clara Vale colliery and Ryton colliery and then completed some amazing art work based on these. We have now displayed our pictures in the corridor at school which you can see here. 
Friday 25th September
 
This week, we have been working on a lovely book called Here We Are written by Oliver Jeffers. This book was written for Oliver's son, to help him think about the planet on which he lives. This got us thinking about the world around us, and although it can be unpredictable and strange at times, how wonderful it can truly be. We discussed lots of different wonderful things in our world and listened to What a Wonderful Word by Louis Armstrong. We then put some of our ideas together to create this lovely little video. We hope you enjoy! 

Friday 18th September
 
Here we are at the end of our first week in Year 2, and what superstars Wales class have been. After a lovely week finishing off their time with Mrs Lawrence, all of the children came into their new classroom on Monday morning with big smiles, plenty of laughter and a wonderful attitude. They have impressed me with the way in which they have adapted to the new routines of the school day, and seem to be taking it all in their stride. 
 
This week has been all about getting to know each other, and we have had a lovely week chatting, drawing, painting, playing games and generally enjoying being back at school. I know we are going to have a wonderful year.