Beginning Our Great Fire of London Topic

This Term we are immersing ourselves in the Great Fire of London

On September 1st 2023 just a few days before we started back at school the topic made national headlines

Great Fire of London: Man who first raised alarm identified

How fantastic to study a topic that is still making the headlines!

We began our DT project by building some Tudor houses, we wanted to identify if they were stable, and how we could improve them when we build our own Tudor houses later in the term. The children were fantastic at cutting out the templates and worked hard together to create the 3D shapes.

Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole

This term we have been learning about Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale in our History lessons.

The children have learnt some key facts about how these amazing nurses helped injured soldiers in the Crimean war, and how their work changed nursing forever!

They have looked at old pictures and some photos to identify how poor the conditions were for the soldiers. They’ve dressed up and practiced being nurses themselves and we are looking forward to meeting a doctor next week to learn more about how to help protect current patients from further illness and infection.

Here are just a few samples of our work, our collaborative work and us pretending to be nurses!

Stone Age Cooking Workshop

Today we welcomed Scott from Wild Cooking to our school to teach us about how Stone Age people would have cooked their food.

We began by learning how to build a fire using a Jenga style set up, we started the fire using a flint and steel, but talked about how challenging using just flint would have been all those years ago.

We prepared Sea Bass, Trout, Venison and vegetable kebabs whilst learning how to create wooden skewers from oak branches. We learnt how to cook the fish in one way, and then using bricks to create a base for our skewers.

 

Some recounts from the children about their experiences:

Useful Information about Year 2

PE this year is on Mondays and Wednesday afternoons, we will be inside and outside during these sessions.

PE kit for all children: Navy Shorts and white T-shirt, plimsolls/ trainers. A navy-blue tracksuit for colder weather – further details can be found on the school website by following this link – School Uniform

The classrooms can be very warm with everyone busy learning, so please ensure your child has a clearly labelled water bottle with them in school each day to keep them hydrated and able to learn.

As a reminder, the school day starts at 8.30 am and ends at 3.15 pm.  Please aim to arrive at school at 8.30am, as important Start Of Day Activities (SODA) take place during the time before worship and we would like all children to benefit from the maximum amount of learning time.

In Fox Class we have Mr Hooper and Miss Carswell

In Hare Class we have Miss Kay and Mrs Newman

In Rabbit Class we have Mrs Dunton (on Monday and Tuesday) Miss McHaffie (on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday) and Miss Howes

The Dot

During our first week of school we were lead through our Worship to look at what makes a Community.

This is our value that we will be focusing on all term, we talked about the wider community around New Romney, other communities we might be part of like clubs or teams and then we looked at our School Community. We talked about people who encourage us and how we can work together as a Class Community to be the best that we can be.

In this week we also read the story called The Dot

We loved how Vashti’s teacher inspired her to become an artist, just by asking her to sign her first picture.

We looked at this Dot song based on the story too!

The children across Year 2 created some artwork based on the dot, we loved how each piece was so unique.

English

This term we have been reading the story of the Cave Baby by Julia Donaldson

The children have loved exploring the text. We have predicted where else the mammoth might take cave baby and explored how he felt when he was first taken.

Year Two have written some amazing stories about cave baby’s adventures, we are so proud of the progress each and everyone has made.

We finished the term with diamante poems. This gave us the opportunity to continue our SPaG work this term through identifying different word groups.

The Creation Story

This term we are looking at the story of the Creation, at St Nicholas we use a scheme of work called Understanding Christianity. We have this lovely Frieze displayed in each classroom, today we have been looking at the part of the frieze that depicts the creation, this picture stimulated some amazing conversations amongst the children and further questions for us to explore.

I wonder what you can see in the picture? The children discussed what might be in the closed tins!

Here is some of our work looking at the Creation and what God made on each day.