Year 2 - Seaside, slapstick and newts!

What do you see when you go to the seaside? That has been one of the questions that Year 2 has been thinking about this week, as they have been using their senses to create seaside poetry. ‘I can spot the sticky seaweed,’ wrote Carteleia, while Sammy said, ‘I can smell the salty waves whilst they crash onto the wet sand.’ Bea wrote, ‘ I love the crunchy sound my feet make as I gallop across the golden sand.’ We were inspired by the poetry of Moira Andrews and we started off the week by learning one of her poems, Down by the Sea, and performing it with actions. The week culminated in the Year 2 children creating their own shape poems, in the shape of footprints, thinking about how footprints look in the sand.

Our seaside theme continued in our Topic lessons where the children were fascinated to learn about the history of Punch and Judy. They found out that Mr Punch has been around for 360 years and that Samuel Pepys wrote about him in his diaries. They loved finding out about what a ‘slap-stick’ is and how, although Punch and Judy shows can look violent, no-one is hurt in the making of them!

This term in Science, we have started learning about living things and their habitats. We read the story of the Gruffalo and discovered that a mouse likes to eat nuts and a fox, owl or snake would like to eat the mouse. From that, the children grasped the concept of a food chain and created their own ‘flip-book’ food-chains using post-it notes. We took our learning outside in Forest School, looking for living creatures in habitats around the school grounds. The highlight of the afternoon was undoubtedly lifting up a log and discovering two small newts!