Moorhen (Year Two)

Moorhen Class 2019/2020

Miss Mitchell, Mrs Jackson, Mrs Wright and Mrs Johnstone

We are really excited to join the children alongside their journey of learning this year and make lots of fun memories with each and every one of them. Please check this website regularly to find out what the children have been up to and to also see if there is any further learning that could be happening at home to support the children towards becoming the best they can be .

P.E - Moorhen children have P.E on a Tuesday and a Wednesday afternoon.

Library - we will aim to change books on a Thursday afternoon.

Reading needs to happen daily. We will aim to listen to your child at least once a week but it is very important for them to be reading each morning or evening with a grown-up or sibling at home. Once your child is fluent then they can snuggle down and enjoy a story independently but it is still a good idea to get them to note down in their reading record what they have read so we can keep a track of how regularly they are reading and ensure they are accessing a range of genres!

If you have any queries or questions, please do not hesitate to catch a member of Moorhen staff at the start/end of the day or alternatively feel free to email Miss Mitchell: bmitchell.3244@st-nicholas.oxon.sch.uk 

Home Learning

Please keep an eye on our class website as I will be updating it as regularly as possible with learning activities and opportunities to try at home. The following websites are also worth a visit for some lovely resources:

Websites

Phonics games - https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/

Oxford Owl - English and Maths information and activities and e-books - https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/

Home learning resources - https://www.twinkl.co.uk/

50-fantastic ideas to try at home - https://abcdoes.com/home-learning/

Literacy apps - https://literacyapps.literacytrust.org.uk/

Apps that other parents have recommended:

• Doodle pad
• Teach your monster to read
• Hairy phonics
• Nessy
• Puppet Pals
• Duolingo

If you find any other websites and apps that are worth sharing please do let me know 

Spring Term 2

Week 4

What will Moorhen class be getting up to in Week 4?

Maths

This week in Maths we are going to be consolidating our understanding of grouping. Last week we were looking at sharing and so far this week have introduced grouping. Please have a look at the examples below and if you would like to have a go at this at home the following link will take you to some fun grouping games 

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/Flash.aspx?f=grouping

English

During English sessions this week, Moorhen class will be using their story-maps (example below) to begin writing their alternative stories based on 'The Tunnel' by Anthony Browne.

Over the last few weeks we have been gathering lots of information and details about the characters, setting and plot of the story and the children have done lots of different activities to think about where the tunnel may lead. Each day we will be looking at a stage of the story map, beginning with the introduction, describing the day it was/weather/what the children and Mum were up too/the point that leads to Mum asking the children to leave. We will then move on to the discovery of the tunnel where the children will use all their fantastic knowledge of emotions and feelings to say how the boy and girl felt. The next paragraph will be focusing on inside the tunnel and this is the perfect chance for children to show off their wonderful adjectives and descriptive writing. The next paragraph will be the most fun! The children can begin describing the world on the other side of the tunnel! The final paragraph will be the ending of the story where the children will reveal whether the children listen to Mummy and get back in time or not for their lunch!

All children will be working at different stages within their phonics lessons, however if you would like to have a go at phonics at home, there are some fun games on the following website: 

www.phonicsplay.co.uk

Spellings this week are:

The /er/ sound spelt with ‘or’ and the /or/ sound spelt with ‘ar’

word
work
worm
world
worth

worst
war
warm
towards
ward

Can you find the above words in the wordsearch?

Purple Mash

As a school we are super duper lucky that our children can access Purple Mash at both home and school. This website (link below) is fantastic and has games, activities and learning opportunities for Maths, English, Science, Computing, Art, Topics - you name it! Purple Mash logins have previously been sent home, however I will be sending all logins out again in book bags if you would like to access this at home.

https://www.purplemash.com/sch/stnicholasox10

Week 3

This week is Science Week! Moorhen class have investigated an awesome science experiment today called Rocket Mice!

First of all we predicted what we thought our experiment was going to be. We had some brilliant ideas such as:

"We might be making a pump to shoot the mice into the air" - Nicholas

"We could make plastic mice and shooting them to make them move" - Phoebe

Then we designed and made our own mice before experimenting with what would happen if we put them onto different sized bottles and squeezed them. We had some brilliant discussions and learnt some new key vocabulary:

gravity

forces

pressure

Finally, we added ears and tails to our mice and discussed/predicted whether this would make a difference to the height the mice travelled. We discovered that as we were adding extra weight to our mice, they did not travel as high! 

We have had a brilliant day exploring Science and are looking forward to more experimenting on Friday! 

Take a look at the pictures and videos below to see our experiment in action.........

Spellings

The 'o' sound spelt as 'a' after a letter 'w' or a 'qu'

want

watch

wander

quantity

squash

quality

squabble

squad

quad

quarrel

It was SPORTSTASTIC to see so many children dressed up in their sporty outfits to help raise money for Sport Relief, thank you for all of your kind donations.

Moorhen class and Kingfisher class spent the afternoon enjoying the sunshine exploring lots of different sports equipment, working together to develop new skills, create their own rules for new games and generally being active and having fun.

It was so lovely to see all of the children working so beautifully together and showing our school values of respect, friendship, love, thankfulness and perseverance.

​​​​​​​

Moorhens have had the most fabulous day celebrating World Book Day! 

So far this term we have been looking at the text 'The Tunnel' by Anthony Browne...

Miss Mitchell has been a meanie and not let us read any further than a couple of the pages because we've been busy generating character descriptions and predicting what was the other side of the tunnel.

However.... today we finally read the rest of the book and discovered that the little boy gets turned into stone when he enters the new world the other side!!!!

After this discovery, we then used clay to make our own sculptures of what other objects we predicted were at the other side of the tunnel. We were absolutely fantastic at this and enjoyed the activity soooo much we didn't want to stop! Some fantastic ideas included; hedgehogs from inside a forest, magic lollipops from a candy world, a large castle, an incredible unicorn and many more (see pictures below).

Thank you Moorhen's for such a fantastic day filled with fun, lots of laughter and discussion about books! 

Spellings - Week 2

'ee' sound as the 'ey'

key

donkey

monkey

chimney

valley

trolley

turkey

hockey

parsley

journey

Week 1

What a wonderful morning at Wallingford Pancake race this morning. Miss Mitchell took 8 children from across year 1 and 2 to the Pancake race and they were absolutely fantastic. The children were absolutely wonderful and did our school very proud. Well done! 

Spring Term 1

Week 5

This week Moorhen class have been busy bringing their ideas to life in Design and Technology! We have looked carefully at houses in the past in History and studied the difference between Tudor houses and houses we have now. After careful studying, we began the process of sketching the Tudor houses carefully using different shades and pressure on our pencil. This week we began transforming our sketches into real 3D structures! The children have worked together in their pairs so fantastically and have thought so carefully about the shape, size and length of the lines/features. They are looking awesome Moorhen's, I can't wait to see the finished products! 

Maths

Moorhen's have continued to wow Miss Mitchell with their perseverance and positive attitude in Maths this week. We have moved on to finding change and solving two-step problems. See the examples below if you would like to have a practise at home!

When you're next in the shop with your grown ups, do you think you can help them work out what change they will need?

Spellings

The 'or' sound spelt with 'a' before 'l' or 'll'

all

ball

call

walk

talk

always

small

wall

fall

altogether

Week 4

We have been very busy Moorhen's this week! We have been historians, authors, mathematicians and scientists!

From our previous learning, we know that during the Great Fire, people had to use leather buckets to put out the fire. We have spoken about how successful we think this would have been and whether there would have been a better material to use? Today we really enjoyed our science lesson where our objective was to independently plan and carry out an experiment to find which material we would choose to use as our buckets. 

Have a look below at us being scientists! 

During our English sessions this week we have been working extremely hard to write our own diary entries. We have thought hard about what life would have been like for a child in 1666 who was witnessing the fire. We have collated our individual diary entries together to make a class diary (see image below). If you would like to pop in one day after school for a few minutes to have a look, I know the children would be thrilled.

Our Maths this week has been particularly tricky, but Moorhen class have shown wonderful perseverance and have not given up! We have been looking at finding the difference between two amounts using a number line. If you would like to have a go at this at home, that would be fantastic. An example of how we have been laying it out is below:

Our spellings this week are:

Adding ‘-ing-’, ‘-ed’, ‘-er’, ‘-est’ and ‘-y’ to Words of One Syllable

patting
patted
humming
hummed
dropping
dropped
sadder
saddest
runner
runny

Week 3

In RE this term we have been exploring New Year, thinking about resolutions and how we celebrate. We then thought about different religions and how they celebrate their new year. We have focused on the Jewish celebration of Rosh Hashana and yesterday enjoyed making their special Honey Cake in groups. They make and eat this sweet cake to remind them of the sweet new year they will be having  See the pictures of us below! 

On Thursday in Science we were thinking about fire! Have a look below at the video and explanation of our science experiment!

This week's spellings:

add ‘-ing’ '-ed' '-er' 'est' and 'y' to words ending in ‘-e’ with a consonant before it

hiking

hiked

hiker

nicer

nicest

shiny

being

shining

scary

scaring

Week 2

We have had a fire-tastic week in Moorhen class!!  If you have time, feel free to pop into our classroom to see our Great Fire of London display which showcases our stunning flames we creaed in Art. We thought so carefully about the colours and texture of a flame and made all our secondary colours by mixing our primary colours! It also has some examples of the work we have done in English - we have looked at chronological order and timelines and created story maps using key dates and information. We have also learnt lots of new vocabulary including leather, drout, Thames and squirter.

In History this week, our learning objective was to show understanding of how we find out information about the past using a variety of sources. Our two sources of information so far have been Miss Mitchell and some brilliant books from our library so on Thursday we decided to use the internet as our new source. We discussed the meaning of the word 'source' .... not to be confused with Mayo and Ketchup! The children were fantastic at using key words to search for new facts to share with their class mates, well done Moorhen! 

In Maths this week we have been looking at Money. We have been adding pounds and pence to create a total using physical equipment to help us. It would be great if you could help support this at home, whether it is if you're out shopping and ask for help adding your items to find a total or at home with little activities such as:

Our spellings this week are:

Adding -ing to words ending in -y with a consonant before it

copying

crying

replying

marrying

carrying

flying

trying

drying

skiing

taxiing

Week 1

What a wonderful first week back in Moorhen class.

We have LOVED our first week of our new topic 'The Great Fire of London' and the children have been so enthusiastic and inquisitive! We enjoyed our hook day where we enjoyed lots of activities based around London and the great fire, then had a go at predicting what we thought we would be learning about.

In art we had a look at blending colours and creating secondary colours using primary colours to create flames. 

Our spellings this week are:

copier

copied

happier

happiest

cried

replied

tried

dried

driest

funnier

Autumn Term 2

Father Christmas!!

We were so excited to have a visit from Father Christmas and extremely grateful for our gifts. We promised Santa we would be good until he comes to visit!

We have enjoyed a lovely last day of term today full of Christmas fun and activities.

All the Moorhen staff would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your support across this term. We have enjoyed every second spending time and watching your children grow and develop and can't wait to see this continue after the Christmas break.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all! 

Week 4 

I want to say a huge well done to all of Moorhen class this week for their fantastic class assembly on Perseverance. They were very nervous but tried their absolute best and did a brilliant job. We are all very proud of you!!!! 

Week 3

This week Moorhen class have been poets. We've been busy working our way through our English learning journey... drafting/editing then learning how to perform our poems and today we were super excited as we went down to Year 1 to perform them!  Every single Moorhen has worked SO hard on their poems and they are absolutely fantastic - you should all be very proud! Grown up's... you may be in for a surprise at the Christmas Fair!

Have a look at the pictures below of us with lovely Grebe class sharing and performing our winter poems! 

We have been lucky this term and have had an additional session of Yoga each week as well as Dance and Rugby! The children have really enjoyed these calm mindfulness sessions - see if they can remember any breathing techniques or moves to teach you at home! Some pictures of us are below...

Week 2

Moorhen class have had a wonderful week - albeit a little out of routine - and have impressed Mrs Rees and Mr Shorter who have had the pleasure of working with them this week. Thank you for being so wonderful, you have made me very proud 

We have been looking carefully at our Learning Journey in English. Thinking about what our end goal is and what skills we need in order to get there. Our end goal is going to be to write and perform our own winter poems! Our audience is going to be the lovely year 1 classes. Our purpose is to entertain the readers/audience and to inform them all about winter. We thought very carefully about the skills we would need in order to reach our goal and have decided we need to learn a bit of background knowledge on winter first. We will need to have a look at adjectives in order to make our poems more exciting and descriptive and we are also going to learn how to write similes to excite our readers! We will then have a look at how we recite and perform a poem using actions/voices and gestures. I can't wait to see the finished product in a couple of weeks! 

Thank you so much to everyone who came in today dressed in pjs or spots, and to those that generously made a donation to Children in Need. We had a wonderful morning participating in Joe Wicks live Big Morning Move along with thousands of other schools in the UK. We then enjoyed a morning learning all about what children in need is/why we donate and then were busy with lots of Pudsy craft and excitment! Thanks for a lovely day Moorhen's!

Week 1

Wow, another wonderful week has whizzed on by. Miss Mitchell would firstly like to thank all the Moorhen's for coming back to school after half term so enthusiastically... we have had a great first week back.

We have enjoyed exploring our new topic title 'Ice Magic' thinking about what we think we already know about winter/seasons/magic and then predicting what great things we think we will learn this term.

In our reading lessons we have been thinking about how we can build our fluency using expression and as a class we had a go at echo reading. Miss Mitchell was super impressed with all the children who had a go at this at home - see if you can teach your siblings, grown-ups or teddies!

Autumn Term 1

Week 8

What a wonderful eight weeks we have had to start our Year 2 journey!  Miss Mitchell, Mrs Jackson, Mrs Wright and Mrs Johnstone could not be more proud of how fantastically all our Moorhen's have behaved and progressed in such a short time.

We have loved our 'Circle of Life' topic and have enjoyed exploring animals, deserts and rainforests. We have looked at how and why it is important to look after ourselves and researched Florence Nightingale to see how she changed nursing for the better. We have been very lucky to have some visitors this term too; Emma the Nurse and Jonathon's Jungle who bought with him some amazing creatures and insects for us to see.

We have been very lucky this term to have coach James with helping us to build our rugby skills and have also enjoyed our gymnastics lessons! We have been looking at balancing and have been progressing our skills every lesson to lead up to mastering handstands! (See pictures below)

I have loved working with you lovely Moorhen's this term and look forward to continuing more fantastic learning during our next topic 'Ice Magic!' 

I  hope you have a very restful and well deserved half term,

Miss Mitchell 

Week 7

We have got to the end of Week 7, and what a busy week it has been! In Maths we have been looking at 'Five Wise' and 'Ten Wise'. We have been using tens frames to help us partition numbers easily. If you would like to have a go at the Maths activity in your book bags then that would be great! Have a look at this one to help you:

What can you see here?

2 + 2 = 4

1 + 3 = 4

10 - 6 = 4

Can you find any more number sentences you can use?

In Science we have been looking at animal food chains, and to help us with this, in Reading we have been exploring non-fiction texts all about animals. We recapped lots of vocabulary such as carnivore, herbivore and omnivore and learned lots of new vocabulary too including amphibian, invertebrate and mammal. I wonder if you can still remember what these words mean?!

Thank you to all adults and wonderful Moorhen's who came to celebrate our wonderful Harvest Festival on Friday. Our prayers were fantastic and our singing voices were beautiful! 

Have a lovely weekend! 

Week 6

Thursday 10th of October is World Mental Health Day!

We began our day with the big question 'What is mental health?' and had loads of different ideas and discussions about what is meant by mental health and why it is so important. 

We then sat calmly with our eyes closed and let our minds run wild with thoughts. As we listened to some relaxing music, every time a negative thought or worry entered our minds, we wrote it on a cloud. At the end of the activity, we spoke about what we could do to help keep our minds healthy and free of these worries:

- Speak to friends

- Speak to an adult

- Sing - as loud as you can! 

- Colour in a picture

- Exercise

- Listen to music

-Write the worries down

After sharing our worries with our peers, we then scrunched them up into the smallest ball we could and threw them in the bin! Throwing our worries and negative thoughts in the bin made us feel much happier and helped us forget all about them! (...Picture below)

We then made our own 'Mental Health' headbands to share positivity and happiness and let others know how important is is to keep our minds as well as our physical bodies healthy! We enjoyed relaxing whilst concentrating on some careful mindfullness colouring. We met Unique the Unicorn and shared all our top tips on how to keep her healthy, both physically and mentally.

Well done Moorhen's - keep smiling! 

This Week's Spellings:

(Common exception words)

door

floor

again

wild

children

climb 

parents

most

only

both

Week 5

Week 5 has been very busy! On Friday we enjoyed spending time with lovely Kingfisher class. They came to visit us in Moorhen and we were able to practice our speaking and listening by sharing with them our fact files that we have been working so hard on this week.

Our spellings this week are:

The /j/ sound spelt using 'g' or 'j'

gem
giant
magic
giraffe
energy

jacket
jar
jog
join
adjust

Below are some photos of us with Kingfisher class if you would like to see 

GUESS WHAT?! We have been looking very closely and carefully every day in our butterfly net to see if we can spot any sudden movements.... andddd on Friday...... FOUR BEAUTIFUL BUTTERFLIES POPPED OUT OF THEIR CHRYSALIS'! 

We fed them some fruit over the weekend to give them energy and let them have a practice fly around in their net. Today we finally let them free, it was amazing to watch them flutter away to start their new lives in the big wide world!

We loved observing the life cycle of a caterpillar first hand and will miss our Moorhen butterflies!

Week 4

Year 2 had the most AMAZING experience today as we were super lucky to have Jonathon's Jungle visit! We were absolutely brilliant at listening to the weird and wonderful facts about the different animals, including a millipede, scorpion, snake, stick insects and tarantula! 

We were soooo brave and some of us even had a go at holding them! Have a look below 

The Spellings we have looked at this week are:

The /j/ sound spelt using '-dge' or '-ge'

badge

edge

bridge

dodge

fudge

age

huge

change

charge

village

Week 3

What a super week the Marvellous Moorhen's have had! We have been looking closely at Florence Nightingale in History, learning about the great impact she had on nursing and the wonderful changes she made over time.

We were extremely lucky this week to be visited by Emma, a local nurse who works in the Children's Ward in Oxford Hospital. This was a fantastic opportunity to hear all about Emma's job as a nurse and her daily roles and responsibilities.

Emma explained to the Year 2's the importance of working hard at school if they would like to have a job such as a nurse or doctor when they grow up! We learnt that Maths, English, Science and Reading are all very important skills that nurses and doctors must have, and Emma told us that she was always  working super hard at school, especially in Year 2!!

Have a look at some pictures below of us with Emma, discovering all the important equipment she carries in her bag!

The Spellings we have looked at this week are:

The /s/ sound spelt using a 'c'

race

ice

cell

city

fancy

face

spade

bicycle

circle

spicy

Week 2

Wow, what a super busy week we have had full of wonderful learning!

In English lessons we have been looking at simple sentences and remembering three super important features: Capital letters, finger spaces and full stops! We then challenged ourselves by looking at conjunctions and seeing if we could use these within our sentences!  

Conjunctions connect two simple sentences together to create a compound sentence. The conjunctions we look at in year 2 are: because, so, but, when, and, if and or

In Maths we have been looking at partitioning tens and ones using a variety of different models. The children are beginning to use cherry models and place value grids to confidently partition two digit numbers into tens and ones. If you would like to have a look at how this works so you can practice these at home, feel free to pop into class to see

.

We have also been busy artists and have been looking at closely at work by the artist Piet Mondrian. We all made our own collage in the style of Mondrian and had a class discussion about primary colours!

The spellings we have looked at this week are:

The /r/ sound spelt using ‘wr’

Write

Written

Wrote

Wrong

Wrap

Wrist

Wreck

Wrestle

Wriggle

Wren

Week 1

We have been so impressed with how all our Marvellous Moorhen's have settled in this week. They have all come back to school eager and ready to learn  We have had lots of fun exploring Friendship and our current value of 'Respect' and have kick started Science by looking at animals and how they change as they grow. Have a look at the pictures  of us working together brilliantly to match the animals and their young. 

Here are the spellings that we have looked at this week...

The /n/ sound spelt using 'kn' and 'gn':

knock

know

knee

knitting

knife

gnat

gnaw

gnome

gnarled