Making lighthouses with electricity

First we got some white and red paper and a cardboard tube. After that we put on some aprons, got some glue and started to cut the paper. We cut both pieces of paper into long strips so they could fit round the tube. Next we glued the strips on in a stripy pattern to look like a lighthouse. Before we started we had looked at pictures so we knew what a lighthouse looks like.

Later on we made a complete circuit using batteries, wires, a light and a battery holder. Then we put our circuit in the lighthouse so the top lit up. We felt excited and chuffed that we got them to light up!

Making puppets

First, we designed our rod puppets on a plan. Then we scrunched some newspaper up to make the puppet's head, nose and ears. Next we put a hard, wooden cane in the head for the body and covered the head with coloured tissue paper to make it look like our character. After that we made a neck using more tissue paper.

"We felt excited because we had never built a puppet before," Quote by Taylor Lurkins.

The next stage was to put a carboard roll on as the puppets shoulders. Afterwards we cut our arms for our puppet from some thin string and glued them onto the shoulders with a hot glue gun.

DANGER! Do not touch the hot glue gun because it is extremely hot and will burn you.

We used stiff garden wire to bend into a hand shape and cellotaped it to the end of the string arms. After we attached the hands we covered them with tissuepaper the same colour as our face to make them look like our character.

Next we made the legs using various pieces of cardboard tubes. We joined these together using small pieces of fabric and the hot glue gun so the puppets could sit down and bend at the knee. This made them look more like our character. We were all very pleased with what the puppets looked like so far.

Later on, it was time for the decoration of the puppets. We put on: button eyes, face detail, hair or fur (depending on our character), a body and clothes. We made sure we looked carefully at our plans for this part so our puppets would look like our characters.

Being Healthy

In science, we were looking at the 5 food groups which are: fruit and vegetables; bread and cereals; milk and dairy; fats and sugars and meat and fish. We cut pictures of the foods out of magazines, sorted them into their groups and labelled them. We went around the year 2 class asking the children and adults what their favourite food was from each group for the cook to decide a new meal. On the computers, we made block graphs to show our results.

Bug Hunt!

Today we went to the huge, grassy Millenium Green to hunt for interesting bugs! We split into two equal groups and went to the forest and the amphitheatre to investigate what colours bugs like the best.

Miss Ingram's group (Lauren, Niki, Liam, Joseph, Hannah, Elle, Stuart and Amber) shook a old, tall tree near the pond and collected bugs in a sheet. We found a long, green caterpillar. We jumped out of our skin with happiness because we hadn't seen a caterpillar in ages!

Near the mini hedges, Mrs Hayhoe's group (James, Tai, Dani, Byron, Emily R, Fred, Jessica and Alice) found some big, bright bees which were resting on the floor. We felt a bit scared because we didn't want to get stung! So we walked away quietly.

In our investigation we found that insects liked yellow and red better!

Making sandcastles in maths!

In maths this week we were practicing measuring using a ruler in cm.

We discussed how to draw an interesting sandcastle then we drew it on paper. Measuring with a yellow ruler we wrote down how long each line was in cm.

Unforunately, our sandcastles were too big to make a book with! So we had to half each measurement on our sandcastle to make it smaller.

We halved the numbers by:

• counting on in 2s,


• using cubes to share between two or


• partitioning the numbers into tens and units.

Our holidays

We are now looking at holidays and seasides as our topic.

First we found our holiday destinations in an atlas, then we found them on the big, colourful map of the world and put string across.

We looked on the internet to find out how many miles away the interesting places we visited were.














We found that:

• Tai visited Greece in 2009
• Dani went to Canada in 2009
• Emily B went to Portugal in 2009
• Jessica went to Egypt in 2002

Seaside collage

Before half-term we all worked together as a team to make a big picture of a seaside scene.

We used materials, paper, paint, card, grass, charcoal, cotton wool, sand and chalk to make different parts of our picture.

"It was fun to work together" - Lauren

"It was funny because Liam and Tai put a smiley face on the sun" - Emily B

The picture is now up in our classroom.

Restaurant menus!

This last week in year 2 we have been writing some disgusting menus!

We opened a yucky restaurant where we were lazy chefs who didn't know how to cook!

Our menus were revolting!

"Yucky ham that tastes like rotten left overs" - Fred Bate

"Cold sausages and old, spicy mash with mouldy vegetages" - Elle Kelner

Unforunately, we had a visit from an inspector and a food critic. They replied that our menu was not fit for humans. So we all wrote letters of complaint to ask for our money back and them to close their restaurant down!

We then decided to change our menus to make them more delightful to get some customers.

"Scrumptious chocolate pudding and delicious ice-cream with a fresh chocolately smell" - Alice Goodwins

"Fresh rainbow fish with fizzy, bubbly coco-cola" - Emily Beath

Then we had lots of customers come to our restaurant!!

Helping Agent Pace cross the desert!

Agent Pace needed our help to find the mines hidden under the hot sand in the desert. He had a rusty, small remote controlled car but he didn't know how to use it! So we practiced using the big silver robots so we could tell him how to work it. We were trying to control them so they would go across the room.

Instructions we used:

• Left
• Backwards
• Right
• Forwards
• Quarter turns (90 degrees)
• Clockwise/Anticlockwise
• Half turn (180 degrees)

We successfully used the shiny, round robots to find the mines and the safe places to cross the desert. We definitely enjoyed helping Agent Pace because we got to use the robots.