School Past and Present

We started our history focus this week by looking at all the wonderful information children had brought in about people who used to attend Luckwell in the distant and not so distant past. We had lots of fun, especially, looking at Grace's mum's photographs of Luckwell in the seventies - do come into the classroom and take a look! We would love some more to put up - thank you Ashley for bringing pictures of her dad in who was at Luckwell in the nineties (and was taught by Mrs Christmas!) We found out a lot of interesting information about how Luckwell has changed (and in some cases stayed the same) and laughed over stories like Jess M-R's neighbour being made to eat spam fritters for school lunch! Yuk!
Today we brought things right into the present by interviewing Miss Fricker from the Y1 classroom. Miss Fricker is training to be a teacher and Y2 generated lots of very sensible questions for her about what her training is like. Take a look at the picture that shows her being interrogated by the Y2 detectives!

Movement, Maths and Mr Magnolia

As you can see in one of these pictures, this week we have started dancing! We worked with Primary Partnership P.E. teacher Debbie Scroggs to create a dance based on the theme of Hawaii. We will take it to a dance festival at Ashton Park School on 12th February to which parents are invited! More details will follow in a letter nearer the time.
We have also been working very hard at maths strategies to add and subtract 9 and 11 - another of the pictures here shows some very enthusiastic people who dashed up after their lunch to carry on working!
Also this week we finished our unit of poetry and had lots of fun changing the Quentin Blake story poem which goes ... Mr Magnolia has only one boot ... into Mr Magnolia has only one SOCK! Here's a picture of one group's work - the rest are on the classroom wall so please come and take a look!

Starting 2009!

Happy New Year to everyone! While it was freezing outside Y2 have been creating lots of warm with the energy coming from their brains because they have worked so hard!

On Thursday Amandine returned from France with Wellington and Antoine who apparantly had a lovely French Christmas. Amandine told us that she got some very strange looks taking photographs of the bears occupying a double seat on the Paris Metro! Here is a picture of Amandine and the bears telling Y2 about Christmas en francais.

We started our slightly different way of afternoon planning this week. This means that instead of fitting a bit of everything in over the week we concentrate on really 'getting our teeth into' a particular subject each week. This week we have been doing P.S.H.E. (Personal, Social and Health Education). We have looked at issues surrounding fairness and have also talked about the emergency services and the circumstances in which they should be phoned. Mrs Hillberg and I were really impressed by the sensible conversations Y2 had with each other while doing role play!

Next week we are concentrating on geography - that's why the children have been asked to draw their journey between home and school on the piece of A3 paper they were sent home with. We will also be looking at plans of the school and the classroom and - at the end of the week - we will be designing our own classroom. That should be fun, watch this space!