Maze Driver

2D had lots of fun building mazes in a maths lesson. Small groups of three built a maze for a toy vehicle to drive through. They then gave directions to each other to guide the vehicle through the maze using clockwise and anti-clockwise turns, and counting number of spaces forward and using half, quarter and full turns.

Later in the week we did work on coordinates and explored treasure maps to find hidden treasure.

2D can now use clear language to describe direction and read and write coordinates accurately.

If you go on holiday to a new place take one of these children with you, I guarantee you won't get lost.

2E Revision

This week the children have mostly been doing various revision activities, to focus their minds a little before our assessments next week.

In English, we started the week with some work on connectives, where the children worked in pairs to think of suitable sentences in which to place a range of connectives. The emphasis was on fun and entertaining sentences and there were lots of imaginative efforts.

They then had a little practice at question marks, exclamation marks, commas to separate items in a list (such as a list of nouns or adjectives) and, finally, the biggie: speech marks. These notoriously difficult to correctly use punctuation marks were employed in the creation of some very strange sentences, many of which involved Mr Oak declaring what a princess he was, or that he was the meanest teacher ever!

Finally, the children practised opening sentences with more sophisticated language, such as 'Glumly...', 'Hurriedly...', 'At the last moment..', 'Excitedly...', Cautiously...' and many more. They enjoyed thinking of suitable scenarios that would require a sentence to start with each one.

In maths the children worked in small groups to answer a range of test questions. The requirement was to work together and if one person in the group knew how to work out the answer, then they must teach the others how to do it, rather than just tell them the answer. It was interesting to see how many children could tell me the answer but found it more difficult to explain the steps they had taken to arrive at that answer. This explaining of their methods is something they will be required to do more often as they move up through the school.

In topic work, the children learnt about Samuel Pepys' diary and then had a go at writing their own versions of a diary, imagining they were a witness to the Great Fire of London. There was some good descriptive language used.

Finally, we welcomed a new member of the class this week. Welcome, Oscar! I was very impressed with the way everyone in the class made him feel welcome and at his ease, especially on his first day. They asked him to join their groups and play their games and have been extremely friendly towards him. It has been a joy to watch how accommodating and hospitable the children are. I know that Oscar's first few days at school were enjoyable and that he already feels a part of our 'family'.

2C Recorder Jamming!

2B - Recounts and 'Direction and Movement'

Today the children wrote some excellent recounts in preparation for the end of term writing assessments. They impressed me with their ability to use a range of writing skills and techniques including....

• time words
• connectives
• adjectives/similes/alliteration/ considering their 5 senses
• punctuation  - including ! ? . A  , ( )  "  "
• the past tense

We will be revising different writing formats over the coming week to help the children develop their writing ability. This will include some poetry, letter writing, character descriptions, story writing and recounts.

In Maths we continued our current topic of Direction and Movement. I was pleased to find that almost all of the children are now confident in making anti-clockwise and clockwise quarter, two quarters, three quarters and full turns. The children put their detective hats on as they solved and created hidden word puzzles using the directional vocabulary we had revised in class.