Monument Trip
We went on a trip to Monument to see where the Great Fire of London started. We walked along Pudding Lane and saw the River Thames. We took photos on our iPads to document the trip.
Building London...
We launched our first topic: The Great Fire of London, by getting creative. We designed and built Tudor houses using cardboard boxes and paper. We decorated our houses using strips of ribbons for the windows and doors. As a class, we had a good think about the materials that we were using to make our houses as close to real Tudor houses as possible. We were so proud of the outcome!
Local History Week
We had a visit from Hackney Archives where we learnt about Hackney in the past and how it has changed.
We have been learning about all the different cultures in hackney and where we are all from and how that has created a diverse community. We made our own flags to represent the countries of our class.
16 different countries!
Art - pencil skills and learning about facial proportions
In art we are learning about different pencil grades and skills to create different marks on the paper.
We also learnt about facial proportion and features.
We will be putting these skills together to create our own portraits later in the term.
Florence Nightingale - The Lady of the Lamp
Today we made our own lamps like Florence. We did some brilliant cutting out, amazed ourselves at how independent we could be and then used tissue paper to create a stained glass effect.
Creating Cityscapes of London during the Fire!
We used marbling inks to create our backgrounds. We then drew a cityscape of London and cut it out. Next we added our cityscape to the background and added flames to represent Fire!
Printing Tudor Houses
In art we looked at the style of houses that were built during the time of the Great Fire and why this caused so many problems when the fire started.
We designed our own Tudor house and then used rollers and printing inks to create our own Prints.
Aging Paper and Creating our own Quills
We teastained paper to age it and then made our own quills using feathers and ink. To write our own diaries in the style of Samuel Pepys
Geography in Willow Class
This term our topic is focusing on our local area and we will compare our area with an African Country where we will be thinking about similarities and differences between the two places.
Identifying the continents and oceans on a map using an atlas. Finding England and London on a map of the UK. Using an atlas to label a world map - continents and oceans
Climate zones, locating hot and cold places in relation to the Equator and Poles. The closer you are to the Equator the _________ it gets. The further away from the Equator and closer to the Poles you get the ________ it gets.
Identify landmarks on a Map following on from our trip around our local area we then used locational language to describe and find human features.
DT - Making a toy car
This week we designed made and evaluated our own toy cars. We had lots of fun working together to create our transport models. We had even more fun playing with them and guess what they all worked.
Transport - Early Travel
Today we learnt about Vikings and how many many years ago they used to travel far and wide using Longboats. We thought about the reasons why they travelled and why they travelled so far. We then made our own Viking Longboats
Observational drawings of toy Transport vehicals - Observational drawings of different modes of transport
We carefully looked at our chosen mode of transport, then we drew them on paper, carefully looking at shape, colour and pattern. I think that Willow class did a brilliant job.
As part of our transport topic we wanted to do some observational drawings of different types of transport. This morning how lucky was it that John Yusuf Tania and Mrs Barry decided to park in our playground instead of the staff carpet so we went out to compete our observational drawings!!
Traffic Survey
Today as part of our transport topic we completed a traffic survey. We did this using a tally chart, using the data collected we then made our own Bar Charts to represent what we had found out.
Art & Design
Designing and Making Clay Transport Models
Making models using construction toys
Making Biscuits
We followed a recipie to make delicious biscuits, carefully weighing ingredients, mixing the dough and cutting them out.
Willow class did then decorate their biscuits beautifully but they ate them before I had the chance to photograph them.
Trip to the National Portrait Gallert
We visited the National Portrait Gallery to see the only portrait of Mary Seacole and to see some of the portraits of Florence Nightingale nursing at Scutari Hospital
DT - Design and Make packaging for a product
We made delicious Christmas Biscuits we then looked at a range of different types of packaging for cakes and biscuits. We discussed what was good about these products and what we did not think was good.
We found that all the products had the name of the product, the ingredients and either a picture of the product or a clear plastic showing the product.
Once we had designed and made (the tricky part) our boxes we then evaluated our products. Our boxes were coloruful and pretty, they included the product name and ingredients and we thought it was important that they were recylable however our products were not very strong and they couldn’t stand getting wet.
Have a look at our packaging we think they are brilliant!
Autumn 2 - Florence Nightingale WOW
We had our Florence Nightingale immersion day - the children found out facts about Florence Nightingale and some of the amazing things she did that make her a significant and important person! Without her our hospitals would be disgusting, dirty and unclean!
Before Florence hospitals often did not make you better but made you worse with so many germs spreading around.
We started the day making our own lamps as Florence was known as the lady of the lamp! We then made our own Florence peg dolls phew poor Florence had to wear a uncomfortable long outfit - we did not think this was the best thing for a nurse to wear.
We ended the day with a role play session, dressing up, using bandages and medicines to fix up the soliders as Florence did.
London's Burning!!
Year 2 spend the last week of term linking their History, Science and Literacy topics by building their own Tudor houses. We worked in teams to build them and thought carefully about the materials used at the time.
What a WOW end to our Great Fire of London topic answering the question excellently of ‘Why did the fire spread so quickly?’ The weather was on our side to showcase the problem with strong winds, houses were closely packed in and were made with wood(paper) and straw.
Year 2 sang London’s Burning as our own London burnt down, luckily Victoria and John were there to ‘pour on water’ when the fire continued to spread from house to house.
Willow class could clearly see why the King wanted London to be rebuilt from brick and stone!
This topic has been a great start to Year 2 and enabled fantastic discussions, lots of learning and a cross curricular creative approach!
Snails....
Willow class had a great time finding snails unfortunatly this meant they were removed from their natural habbitat many of us were very interested in watching and finding out more about snails so we decided to make our own DIY snail sanctuary, we added mud, bark, leaves and grass with some water to a tray, we gave them some banana and placed the snails carefully in. This meant we could watch and learn whilst letting the snails be. We made sure we were as quiet as excited children can be and had a great time.
