Crabtree Infants' Year 2: Friday 20th September

This week in English we have been focusing on poetry. We read a range of poems by Giles Andreae in an anthology called ‘Mad About Minibeasts’.

We talked about what we liked and disliked about the poems. Our ideas included rhyming words, alliteration and words chosen carefully for effect.

On Tuesday we read a poem called ‘Eeny, Meeny Minibeasts.

We talked about the poem and then recorded our ideas using this writing frame.

I like ______ poem because …….

My favourite part of the poem is the part where

I don’t really like ______ because……

On Thursday we read and performed the poems by Giles Andreae in groups of three. We added actions and used intonation in our voices to make it more interesting for the audience.

On Friday we did an activity to help develop the children’s vocabulary. They had a picture of a minibeast and had to think of the best words or phrases to describe it. Here are some of our ideas. When you have an adjective, adjective, noun it is called an expanded noun phrase. We will be using this expression a lot throughout Year 2.

You could repeat this activity at home with your child and would love to see some of the words they came up with.
Can your child identify the nouns and adjectives in this list?

Can your child think of two different adjectives to improve this sentence?

Next week we will be writing our own minibeast poems using many of the words we have found this week. Ask your child what their favourite word was.

Home learning

You may like to read some poems with your child and use the writing frame above to discuss the poems after reading them. Also as they read can they use some intonation in their voice to make the meaning of the poem clear.

Please send in any poems about minibeasts to add to our class anthology.

This week in phonics – we recapped the digraph ai, ay, a-e.

Spellings
Over the next few weeks please ensure your child can spell the Year One common exception words.

This week in maths, we have been counting, reading and writing numbers to 100. We have been practising counting forwards and backwards in ones from any number. Some of us find ‘crossing the tens’ tricky (i.e. 70 – 69, 60 – 59 etc.), please practise counting backwards from any number at home.

On Monday we started by selecting a number and then making that number using a variety of resources. This helps us check the children’s understanding of numbers. For example, knowing that 67 is made of 6 tens and 7 ones. Some of us challenged ourselves to make 5 more than the given number. Here are some photos of the ways we made numbers.

The next day we practised reading numbers to 100 by playing ‘Splat the Square’. https://www.primarygames.co.uk/pg2/splat/splatsq100.html We discussed how we know that, for example, 54 is not 45, by looking at the tens and ones. We then read numbers written in words. We used our phoneme fingers to help us. We then worked as a group to match numerals and words.

The next day we started by listening to a ‘Numbers to Ten’ story and we wrote the numbers in words as we heard them. We then played ‘Splat the Square’ again, but this time discussed how we write the numbers in words. We thought about different strategies we could use. For example, the word ‘four’ has four letters and ‘eight’ is spelt the same as ‘light’, but with a different letter to start. We then extended this to numbers to one hundred. We discussed how we add ‘ty’ to the end of words such as ‘seven’ to make ‘seventy’. We rolled dice to make 2-digit numbers and recorded these in our books. We then wrote the number in words, using a word bank to help us, if needed.

Please help your child learn to write all numbers to one hundred in numerals and words.

This week in art we were using clay. In this first lesson we explored what we could do with the clay. First we pulled, pinched, rolled the clay into a round ball and a long sausage shape, coiled it and flattened it.