Year 2 - Traditional tales and marvellous Maths

What a busy start to the half term we have had in Year 2! After the excitement of Take One Picture, there has been a real buzzing energy in the classrooms over the past couple of weeks and the children have demonstrated fantastic commitment and enthusiasm for their learning.

Our Maths’ skills have gone from strength to strength over the past few weeks. We have been practising our addition and subtraction skills and we now know how to add and subtract 2-digit numbers using a number line and the expanded column method. Now that we are more confident, we have moved on to look at fractions. This week, we have been focusing on finding halves and quarters, in particular thinking about how shapes need to be cut into equal parts.

Our focus in English at the moment is Traditional Tales and we have been inspired by ‘Tales from India’ by Bali Rai which we read before the half term holiday. These Indian stories are full of brilliant characters and good moral lessons and we absolutely loved them! Our Traditional Tale is called The Trapped Tiger, a story all about a sneaky tiger who is trapped in a cage. He asks a man to release him and promises not to eat him, but he breaks his promise. The Year 2 children have learned this story and would love to tell you all about it! This week, we have been thinking about innovating the text; the children have chosen new characters to be trapped in the cage and other animals to include in their stories. We have been amazed by the language choices the children have been making: “At the sight of a full grown fox crying like a baby the little girl gave in,” wrote Jemimah.

In ICT, we have been using the Puppet Pals app to retell this captivating story in a different way. We have taken photos of the characters in the tale and then added our voices and sound effects to create a puppet show. We had so much fun that it was difficult to record ourselves without giggling!