Hill Top Primary Academy

Year 2
Welcome to our class page! We will keep this page updated with our topic work, any notices we may have and all of our achievements so please keep checking in to see what we have been up to.

The adults working in Year Two are - Miss Monaghan, Mrs Harris and Mrs Towler (Thurs AM)

General Information
PE kits will be needed on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Homework will sometimes be sent out on a Friday and will need to be returned by the following Friday. Maths homework will be MyMaths.

Look below for a snapshot of the practical Maths activities we have been doing this half term. We have looked at shapes and their properties, fractions and measurement.

The Yorkshire Suffragette - Dora Thewlis

We really enjoyed learning about a Suffragette that was from West Yorkshire. Watch the video below to find out all about Dora Thewlis.

The Suffragettes!

Our next focus in our topic was on the Suffragettes. We started by talking about what it means to be fair and equal towards others and thought about how we would feel if we were treated unfairly.

We learnt about several members of the Suffragettes and how they fought for women to get the vote and be treated equally. We created our own posters with eye catching slogans, found out facts about Emmeline Pankhurst and Emily Davison and created newspaper reports about the Epsom Derby and the rallies outside the Houses of Parliament.

Jane Goodall

We watched a video in class that happened to show some information about the work of Jane Goodall. We were all immediately intrigued and decided to spend an afternoon researching about her. We made posters to help her conservation work with 'Saving the Chimpanzees'

Watch the link below to find out about her work!

Continents

We learnt about Captain Scott and his expedition to the South Pole. We then used this information in our Geography work to locate the seven continents. We enjoyed singing the song below to help us remember the names and some key facts about each of them. Im sure the children would be able to sing along with this at home!

Design task - We created our own board games based on climbing to the summit of Mount Everest. We had to think about aspects of the game that would make it challenging for the players to reach the end. We created some fabulous games and really enjoyed testing them out with our friends. There was some lovely team work and turn taking going on around the classroom!

Edmund Hillary!

This week we have been learning about the life and achievements of Sir Edmund Hillary. We have learnt about his successful climb to the top of Mount Everest and have written diary entries as part of our English work. During one of our topic sessions we used Google Expeditions to 'travel' to Mt Everest ourselves and see what it is really like! We had great fun exploring the different points that Edmund Hillary himself would have visited and recorded our journey in our books.

Entry Point - Wednesday 28th February

Today we travelled 'Through the Decades' as part of our entry point. Year 1 and 2 worked together across both classrooms to experience events, food, fashion and much more from the 1930's to 2000's. In the afternoon we looked at different dance styles that had emerged from different periods of time and the children had a go at choreographing their own Charleston dance!

Spring 2 - People of the Past

This term our topic will focus on the lives and achievements of a variety of famous people. Each week we will learn about someone new and complete lots of topic work about them.

In History, we’ll be ﬁnding out:

About the different decisions that rulers had to make in the past
How to use a living graph to explore how a person from history might have been feeling
About the life of a famous explorer using maps and role play
How to compare the lives of two different explorer
About the achievements of important scientists and inventors
About what life was like at different times in the past

In Music, we’ll be ﬁnding out:

About the life and music of a famous composer
How to use music to tell the story of our famous composer

In Art, we’ll be ﬁnding out:

What we can learn about a person from their portrait
How to create a portrait of a friend
About the work of famous artists
How to paint a scene in the style of a famous artist

In International, we’ll be ﬁnding out:

About the idea of ‘fairness’ and what it means
Why some people in the past wanted to make change

We have had a lovely day in year 2 today - It was our long awaited "Pirate Day."

We had lots of activities taking place, making pirate biscuits, playing pin the eye patch on the pirate and lots of dancing too!

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Reading in year two - this week we are concentrating on reading fluently. We are keeping our books for the whole week and we are doing lots of activities involving that book. For example; writing a book review, writing an alternative ending, designing a new book cover, finding adjectives in the book, writing about the characters in their book and even comparing books by different authors.

Here is a link to see a child at year 2 expected level reading a book - it is not perfect but that is the fluency we are aiming for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v3XOsTF33Y

When your child reads a book for the first time they are decoding and meeting unfamiliar words and finding out their meaning.

On the second reading children can start to understand the plot and the characters.

On the third reading children can start to add intonation and "voices" for characters.

Children can then read fluently, this is why reading a book more than oonce is really important.

I hope this helps to explain.

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Our Spring 1 Topic is Treasure Island

We have been dressing up as pirates.

We all had fun at the KS1 Christmas party - We even had a surprise visitor!!!

17/12/18

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Christingles at the Methodist Church

6/12/18

Today we visited the Methodist Church to learn what the Christingle represents. We then, had a chance to make one to take home.

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Our trip to Armely Mills Industrial Museum

4/12/18

We had a fantastic time on our class trip.

First of all we had a work shop where we had to be detectives and find out how sheep fleece became thread that we can used to make cloth.

Then we did some human weaving and went on to weave our own paper sheep and very importantly, had lunch!

After our delicious lunch, we went back in time and into costume, to find out what life was like for Victorian children working in the mills.

Finally we went into the mill family cottages to find out what life was like when the mill children got home from work. We made rag rugs and even saw the mill managers house too!

It was very different from the cottages the families lived in.

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We carried out scientific tests to find out if our lunchboxes were suitable for Pirate Paddy

28/11/18

We had an exciting challenge from Pirate Paddy.

He needed us to design and make him a lunch box that would be strong enough to be transferred from one ship to another by zip wire.

It needed to be waterproof, even in the most horrendous weather conditions and it also needed to have compartments to keep the food protected from birds and mermaids!

We did a fantastic job!

We have now started our new topic - "All Dressed Up"

Our entry point was to design and make an outfit for their teddy.

We have been so impressed with the designs and the outcomes.

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Today we launched some of our rockets.

Ask your child what we used to make them lift off. Which do you think flew the highest and why?

11/10/2018

Our visit to West Ardsley Methodist Church to see the knitted bible exhibition.

11/10/2018

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Our IPC Topics this year are:

Brainwaves
A to B
All Dressed Up
Treasure Island
People of the Past
I'm Alive
Sensational

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Brainwaves.

Our first IPC topic this year was Brainwaves.

The big idea

Our brain is special because it does lots of amazing things. Once we understand how our brain works and what we can do to make it work even better, then we can improve the way that we learn.

In this unit we found out about:
How the brain works
About the personal goals that help us to become better learners
How to find out facts to prepare for a special challenge
How to learn and practise skills for a special challenge
How to record how well we are learning
How to use what we have learned to create our own special challenge
How to wake up our brain
How to look after our brain
How to design a classroom for learning

We also talked about our IPC values and the children worked hard to explain what they were and how we see this in everyday life.

A To B

This is our current topic.

The Big Idea

Every day people all over the world make different types of journeys – on land, on sea and in the air. To make these journeys we have invented lots of different ways of getting from A to B.

Explaining the Theme
In Geography, we’ll be finding out:
How we travel to school
How to make maps to record our journey to school
How to create our own train journey around the host country
How we can travel to different countries
How to create our own activity holiday
In History, we’ll be finding out:
About transport in the past
How to make a timeline to show when different types of transport were invented
About exploring different types of transport from myths and legends
In Art, we’ll be finding out:
How to create our own futurist painting to capture the speed and movement of transport
How to create a boat collage in the style of Turner and Monet
In Science, we’ll be finding out:
How to make our own sail boats and aeroplanes and rockets
In Technology, we’ll be finding out:
How to make a ‘vehicle’ to transport a small toy from one place to another
How to make plans for vehicles
How to test our vehicles to see how well they work
In Music, we’ll be finding out:
About the sounds different types of transport make
How to create our own ‘sound journey’
In Society, we’ll be finding out:
How to cross roads safely
About bicycle and road safety
About people with restricted mobility
In ICT & Computing, we’ll be finding out:
How to create a simple algorithm
How to program Bee-bots to follow precise instructions
About multi-player online gaming and how to stay safe online
In International, we’ll be finding out:
How children around the world travel to school