Welcome to Year 2 blue & yellow English class blog.
Sorry if it took so long to upload these photos and information collected during our great learning journey.
But here we are… Finally ready to story tell you what we have been doing from the beginning of March and allowing you to peep inside our class doors to get a glimpse and a taste of our days in year 2 classes.
We hope you will enjoy it as much as we do, when we discover new things together.
Let’s start from telling you about our Star chart.
We make sure everyday children can understand how to get a star!
Year 2 pupils became immediately aware that in every lesson there are few goals that need to be reached. Teachers, at the beginning of each lesson, explicit learning objectives and success criteria to children and break down daily lesson’s goals clearly. Each time a child reach one of the goals gets a tick. Every time children are able to fully reach all the activity’s goals within a lesson time, whilst also respecting our 5 LR (Learning Rules) they get a star at the end of the lesson.
5 Learning Rules:
- use your English hat during English lessons and speak with peers and teachers only in English
- respect your friends and teachers, by listening to them and wait patiently for your turn
- explain any difficulties you may encounter using your words
- help anyone in need
- always try your best
Every Friday in both classes we make sure there is some time at the end of the day dedicated to golden time. During this time we celebrate our weekly successes. All children are now capable to reach at least 4 stars a week and some of them are trying to reach 10 stars and above! We are very proud of them. So on Friday everyone get a small jelly bear, a fezzy cola candy or a sticker and those with 10 or more stars in addition can also chose a special price amongst different small, attractive items.
Plenary
At the end of a unit we make sure we allow some space at the conclusion of the work for a plenary and celebrate each other learning and success. This is helpful to highlight good quality and support improvements. It also teaches children to appreciate each other’s abilities and helps to create a sense of pride and belonging to our class group.
Reading time
We make sure that we engage into weekly reading time where we are fully involved in a quiet time exploring class books. During this time children are listened to on a one to one bases in order to double check their fluency and comprehension. Reading skills are however used in different daily occasions when children are engaged gathering information,understanding instruction, presenting their work, as well as during assessment time.
Ms. Marion is often there, supporting us so that our reading skills can blossom! She prepared a great wall chart for each class with all the titles of our class books and the pupils’s names. So children can sign every time they chose a book for their homework pack. What a great additional occasion for reading and searching through alphabetical order! Thanks Marion.
We love when we explore the library, especially when there is a Book fair and we can have the opportunity to go through so many new different boxes!
Writing Projects
Since the beginning of March children are offered weekly occasions for writing. Writing activities are linked to relevant topic where children can feel motivated and confident to fully participate.
The classes were introduced to extended writing tasks that were meant to become special surprises for their dads. Children used brain maps to collect their ideas regarding reasons why they love and like their dads. They were also introduced to the use of a word bank and learnt to refer to it to access interesting and useful words. We used colourful papers as a support for our sentences, as well as some art and craft to enhance interest and motivation.
We also turned our initial dad greeting card into a special card, thanks to the contribution of one of the year 2 children from yellow class. This child is an expert in paper folding and was willing to teach how to make paper’s hearts to all of his friends from both classes. So the initial project turned into a great learning experience, where we learnt to appreciate one of our friends’ great skills and we became aware that we can learn so much from each other, if we are able to see and consider our friends’ strengths and abilities.We enjoyed it so much that we decided to share our experience and expertise with all the primary classes during yellow class assembly.
We then discovered that after drafting a piece of writing it is important to edit it, before present it to an audience. We were extremely motivated to do our best, knowing that our first audience was a very special one: our dads!
This is how our classes looked like the night before dads’ came to visit us…
In order to celebrate the excellent work done by the children, teachers decided to link the children’s work in both classes. So Year 2 pupils in Italian were involved in writing a biscuit’s recipe exploring the elements of instructional writing and editing their work into a special giant card for their dads. Whilst during English time we had fun preparing the biscuits! Dads or brothers were invited to join the classes for a special breakfast where they were offered a coffe and all these biscuits made the day before. Children gave their presents to their dads and played some board games with them to celebrate Father day together.
Creative Writing: “The Big Bad Wolf”
We read a couple of different versions of the well known Fairy Tale Little Red Riding Hood. We acted it out in class to support understanding and use of specific vocabulary. We had lots of fun, with ms. Marion helping us! Then children received the story cut into pieces and had to sequence it back in the correct order.
Does it sounds easy?…..It was a BIG task!
We had to learn to:
- work in pairs
- read attentively each sentence
- divide the stripes according to beginning, middle and end of the story on our tables
- sequence the sentences belonging to each part of the story, writing numbers in order not to get confused
- compare our findings as a class to double check our work
- correct any mistakes and stick it into our books
And we made it!! Well done kids!
The day after we went back to the story, looked at the different characters, discussed how a story can change and orally we invented new versions of the traditional story. Then we stopped at the Big Bad Wolf.
We wanted to understand:
- What does it look like?
- What has he done?
- Why do we want people to know about him?
- How could other animals and children feel protected from him?
We discussed all of this together and planned our writing. Children were asked to draw and describe the wolf using a word bank and guiding questions. At the end we also painted a big poster for the class.
Eggs Hunt! What a fun way to revise learning…
In Key Stage 1 we planned an Egg Hunt, a really fun activity where we connected both year 2 and year 1 children. Thanks also to parents, who supported the idea and provided lots of big eggs, it was a great success. Children were put in mixed trios from each of the three classes and were linked together by a ribbon knotted to each wrist. We made 16 groups and divided them into four teams. Each team had a map of the park where six stations were highlighted. At each stop children met a teacher and received a task that they had to complete in order to get the possibility to go to the next station. Children were involved solving riddles, additions and subtractions, problems, spellings quest, grammar questions and so on. The activities were in English and in Italian. Children were so busy and involved that they didn’t realized how much they revised! At the last station they were given maps that finally took them to one of the four areas in the park where each team, guided by teachers, was able to find the treasure.
It was a very good team game both for children and teachers!
In the next posts we will keep you update with what more we’ll be doing.
Friday assessment day.
On Friday we take Spelling and Cambridge Reading & Writing tests. We are proud of our achievements and learnt to correct our work all together at the end of each test. As you can see from our photos this is the only time when we work by ourselves. At this point of the year we are all able to be concentrated and are aware that the best way to overcome a difficulty is to attentively read each text more then one time and carefully look at pictures, before attempting to write. We learnt to insert one answer at the time and to check the meaning in part 4.
Every week we are becoming more confident. We are very proud!
Let’s party!
We work hard but we also like to have fun and one of the things we enjoy the most is celebrating our birthdays together!
