Base 2 News

As always, we've had a super week in Base 2. This week was particularly special because we were the lucky class to welcome our Grandparents into school to have lunch. The children had such a lovely time, thank you so much to everyone who came.

In literacy this week we have started to explore the pages in our current focus book 'The Sea of Dreams'. It is a picture book with no words and so is challenging the children to use their own words to tell the story using all the details in the pictures. They are doing a fabulous job and each time we 'read' it, it is a little bit different and has even more detail. We met one of the characters this week and the children had to put themselves in her shoes to write a diary entry about her day at the beach. Y2 have been focussing on writing exclamation sentences, writing in the past tense and explaining their thoughts and feelings. Y1 continue to focus on consistent use of capital letters and full stops (which we are getting really good at!) as well as starting to use the conjunctions 'and' and 'because' to make their writing more interesting. The children were so focussed as they planned and wrote their diaries, it feels like each week they are getting better and better at working independently and writing at length. I am very impressed!

In maths we continue to work on shape. We consolidated our 2D shape work and have moved onto 3D shapes. We have done a lot of practical work and one of our favourite games this week has been hiding shapes inside a bag and then answering questions from other children until they can guess the 2D or 3D shape! The children are doing a great job of remembering and using mathematical vocabulary (vertices, sides, edges, faces) to describe the shapes and have been spotting the different shapes around school. See if they can find you any at home! Next week we will work more on our problem solving skills by sorting shapes and investigating their properties.

In our history this week we have learnt more about Shackleton and his expeditions. We have learnt all about his ship, Endurance (and what the word endurance means!), and can now confidently name different parts of a ship. This linked with a visit we had from the RNLI when we learnt about the important work they do and their lifeboats, so of course, we had to check that the Endurance had a lifeboat too. It did, phew! This work was the groundwork for our Design and Technology project. We are going to be making our own boat to try and sail across (a much smaller version of) Antarctica. On Wednesday we discussed what makes a really good boat and wrote up our design criteria. We then the explored materials available for making the boat and drew our designs, carefully labelling them with the material each part will be made out of. We are excited to start the making next week.

In PE we are working on jumping. We had great fun with an obstacle course this week, jumping over different things and concentrating on taking off and landing on two feet. Please do remember to bring in PE kits with long bottoms and jumpers. We do try to go outside whenever possible.

A note about homework: we will now be setting a maths task every week to consolidate what we have been learning in school. As usual, this will either be a task in the green homework books or a MyMaths task and it will be sent home on a Monday.

I sent home a note on Friday about an optional 'finding out' homework task. It would be lovely if you choose to help your children find out about a polar animal of their choice and we would love to hear what they have found out back in school. Each Monday we put aside some time for show and tell and I am trying to encourage the children to bring things that relate to our learning in school. If they do complete this homework it would be a great thing to bring in to talk about at show and tell.

I hope you are all enjoying the weekend.
Miss Pitchford