Author: Mrs Lake

Today, Year two had a fantastic trip to Lotherton Hall to learn about animals and their habitats. Guided by the educational specialists, we explored different habitats and the animals that call them home.

We compared the skulls of a herbivore and a carnivore, noticing how their teeth are perfectly suited to their diets. The children were fascinated to learn that penguins have sharp tongues to help them grip slippery fish!

 

Help at Home by:

• Explore your garden or local park and talk about the animals and their habitats.
• Read books about animals and how they survive in the wild.
• Watch nature documentaries together

We are using our class novel, Here We Are (Notes for Living on Planet Earth) by Oliver Jeffers to inspire our reading and writing over the next few weeks. This week, we have enjoyed reading and discussing the book and picking out the main themes and messages.

Each day, this week, we have looked at a new reading skill. We have been using our retrieval skills to read the text and find answers to questions from within the text.

Most children were also able to write their own retrieval question.

Another skill we have explored more this week, is being able to infer the meaning of new words or vocabulary in a text. We learnt how to read around the word to make sense of the unknown word.

We will link the book to our geography learning about our local area too.

Help at home

• read the book again and talking about the key messages
• talk about our local area – particularly what you like and dislike about it
• help your child learn their address
• read other books by Oliver Jeffers

There is a link to listen to it here. (This is a YouTube link. Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog along the play bar and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip.)

 

This half term, we are learning about art – both practically and some art history too.

We are learning about Georges Seurat, who used pointillism (dots), and Bridget Riley, who is an optical artist (uses shapes, pattern and colour to create illusions).

 

We have created dots using cotton buds and bubble wrap.

Help at home by talking about your preferences for certain artists or colours and shapes.

We are linking it to learning about nouns and adjectives in our writing. We are also using our retrieval and inference skills in reading and thinking about the author’s choice or words and phrases.

 

Help at home by discussing the text with your child. How is Little Red different to the traditional tale Little Red Riding Hood?