Meerkat Mail
Small, but strong!
Heroic Meerkats praise family motto, STAY SAFE, STAY TOGETHER! Our reporters (Year Two) investigate.
When we got to class we had a special delivery, a postcard and a book! We took a closer look at the postcard that we had found and realised it was from Sunny. We looked at all of the things that a postcard includes.
Then we pretended that Sunny had visited Southport and wrote a postcard as if we were him. We used what we'd learnt about Southport in our Geography lessons to explain where Southport is and what there is to do there.
Non chronological reports
Today we discussed what we would like to know about meerkats. We came up with loads of great questions. When we had done this, we grouped the questions into similar topics. We had four different topics. In pairs we then had to find the answers to the questions by researching on laptops and iPads. We recorded our facts on post it notes ready to share with the class tomorrow.
We have now planned our reports and we are starting to write them. Mrs Lavelle is so excited to see how much we've learnt!
Our trip to the eco centre
On Tuesday and Wednesday, year 2 set off on their long walk to the eco centre. Julie was waiting for us there and helped us to learn about our local area. She took us on a walk along part of Sefton coastline. Have a look at the pictures to see what we spotted.
Back at the centre, we had our lunch then completed some activities. Take a look at what we got up to.
We played a board game that taught us how to reduce and reuse the water we use.
We had a go at hook-a-duck, each duck represented an item that has been washed up on Sefton's coast. We had to complete a treasure hunt to find two things that each material could be made into if it was recycled properly. Then we ticked them off our lists.
Finally, we followed instructions to make a cicuit. We used small solar panels, that when connected properly and screwed together would power a small windmill.
When we had completed all of the activities, we took part in a quiz to show what we had learnt. We had a wonderful day.
Thank you to the parents who contributed to our trip and made it possible for the children to have such a fun but informative day. Another big thank you to the parent volunteers. Your help was invaluable!
Science Week
This year the theme is journeys. In year 2, we linked this with our trip. Mrs Lavelle read the children a story called Messy Magpie. In this story someone throws a can out of the car window and it hits the bird. The magpie thinks it is a present for him and takes it to his nest. The magpie collects so much rubbish that his once beautiful habitat was turned into an ugly, messy tip! After lunch, it looked like a messy magpie had visited our platyground. 1/2EC and 2EL went to see what had happened. The children were shocked to see such a mess. We got into groups and helped to collect the rubbish. We found plastic bags, bottles, tins/cans and cardboard amongst other things. When we had collected all of the mess, we created a tally chart to show how many of each thing we'd collected. Using the tally chart to help us, we created pictograms and bar charts to display our results.
The journey of a plastic bottle
On our trip, we learnt that plastic bottles could be recycled and made into a school fleece. This really shocked us! We learnt more about the process and then wrote a diary entry as if we were the bottle on our journey from crude oil, to plastic bottle and then school fleece.
Design Technology/Science
In Science we have been learning about health and hygeine. We've spoken about the effect exercise has on our bodies (in PE), written instructions about handwashing and designed balanced, healthy meals. In design technology, we are designing and making a fruit smoothie and its packaging.
First, we tasted some existing smoothies and evaluated the colour, taste and packaging. Then, we decided the flavours we liked the most and began to design our own smoothies.
When we had chosen our ingredients, we made a class tally chart so Mrs Lavelle and Mrs Cain knew how much of each fruit to buy. We answered questions like 'how many more children chose banana than strawberry?' and 'which was the most popular fruit?' Then it was time to get making! We chose appropriate tools and found the best way to make each piece of fruit smaller. Then we added the fruit, juice and any exotic extras to the blender.
Then it was time to taste. Once we had done this, we ealuated our smoothies saying what we liked and what we would change.
We also designed and made packaging for the smoothies. We used examples to see what needed including. We included pictures, ingredients, recycling reminders, jokes and even carbohydrate information!
Mrs Lavelle's favourite joke was...
"What do you call a smoothie at a party?"
......... "A groovy!"