It’s great to be back – even if the weather hasn’t quite realised it’s summer!

Last week we had a fantastic Earth Day! workshop with Green Up Your Act organised by Mrs Wick. We made some brilliant fish out of previously used plastic.

This week in English we have been analysing the writing of our focus author Shirley Hughes. We looked at expanded noun phrases.

We have also started to investigate how to grow healthy plants by placing cress seeds in different environments.

We finished the week with a slightly damp forest school but the boys had a great time!

Enjoy the bank holiday and have a lovely long weekend!

There were so many photos from all the exciting activities last week that we decided to save these pictures of the Easter Egg Hunt until this week.

Have a lovely holiday!

We couldn’t have been luckier with the weather on our visit to Hampton Court. There was a real feeling of spring among the daffodils and the magnolia when we faced the famous maze. The workshop about Tudor Times was fascinating – we even learnt how to dance and Ms. Morrissey was a very regal queen! The kitchens had a roaring fire and we saw the second most expensive thing that King Charles III owns – the wall-hangings in the Great Hall!

 

We loved our Science workshop this week.

And we continued our learning about wellbeing.

We have also had an Easter Egg Hunt today – thank you to all our parents for supporting the

Only three and a half days until the holidays (can you believe it?) so please remember chocolate mufti on Monday for the Year 8 Easter Bazaar which will take place on Wednesday afternoon and uniform not PE kit on Thursday for the end of term assembly before a 12pm pick up. No more reading books will be sent home after Monday so please make sure that they, and all library books are returned. Thank you!

It was another busy week as we celebrated books, International Women’s Day and poetry!

The costumes today were amazing!

We loved Zohab Zee Khan’s poetry workshop and can’t believe Steven Vinacour wrote about a time travelling toilet!

We have been working collaboratively on poetry in our English lessons too!

Teamwork was also the name of the game in science where we independently, planned our investigation into friction, and then worked as a team to test our hypothesis. We learnt so much!

As next week’s spelling test is taken from across the term we used EdShed to revise the Stage 1 and 2 spelling patterns on the iPads.

After such a lot of hard work we really enjoyed our ‘Golden Time’ this afternoon as you can see!

We can’t wait for our trip to Hampton Court next Thursday which means ‘Show and Tell’ will be on Friday!

Happy St. David’s Day and we were so lucky today with the weather. We were a bit worried that it was going to be very wet at forest school but the sun shone on us and we had a great time making shelters, finding slugs and worms and creating gourmet dishes (!?) in the mud kitchen.

We also had a wellbeing workshop this week and have been revisiting the breathing exercises we learnt. Ask us if we can show you them! We use our fingers to help us.

 

We also worked collaboratively to create mind maps inspired by poetry, started to investigate money and planned our science experiment on friction we will do next week.

Remember next week is our book week where we will meet a poet and an author, have our poetry competition finals – well done Haikhun and Nicholas who will be representing 2WM – and we can dress up as a book character if we wish on Friday (this is not the same day as the senior boys who are dressing up on Thursday!)

We also have open classroom on Thursday but please do check your time so that we can fit you all in the room!

 

Can you believe that we are half way through the Year now and we are well on our way to being mature enough to join the Early Seniors! But not quite yet… we still have lots of learning to do in Year 2!

This week we were lucky enough to have not one but two workshops!

The first was on Wednesday about Lunar New Year and we had a great time !

Doesn’t it look amazing!

On Thursday we had a Perform! drama workshop all about the rainforest and the environment and we discovered how we can help to reduce our impact on global warming. There were some very interesting ideas about how different materials could be re-used or recycled!

What a fantastic end to the half term and we are all ready for a rest! We look forward to next half term (even though it is very short) where we have parents’ evening on Thursday 29th February (booking information has been emailed for this so please do book your appointment) and open classroom on Thursday 7th March.

Have a lovely break!

The week started with a lovely breakfast, the boys loved telling each other about their food choices and enjoyed a ‘soft-start’ to the Monday morning.

This afternoon our Wellbeing Committee will be presenting their new initiative to support children’s mental health in the Pre-Prep assembly and then again on Monday to the Early Seniors. The older boys in the school use a system called ‘Pulse’ on their iPads to check in weekly with how they are feeling.

Pre-Prep and some of Early Seniors will be using the new colour monster tokens to do the same thing and we will be able to share more about this next week following our full launch!

In English, the boys have been looking at contractions.

We also worked in groups to create posters to save the rainforest and were excited to link our geography work on the water cycle with our science work on materials and changing state.

One more week until half term, not long to go!

We were so excited to go to the senior science labs this week where Mrs Barry helped us learn all about how heat can change materials.

We were able to use our knowledge of the water cycle from our geography lessons last week to help explain what happened to the water when it was heated.

Mrs. Barry showed us how to use a Bunsen burner safely and we have put lots of our learning on display, we look forward to you seeing it when we have our next open classroom.

This week, we have also drawn portraits of famous queens, made posters about the Victorian era and found out about indigenous tribes. We also used the iPads during golden time to play spelling games using Edshed. We all have logins for this in our home school communication books so we can play at home!

Please remember it is mental health week breakfast on Monday, no nuts please!

 

 

We have been so busy this week! We have loved learning all about verbs in English and our rainforest writing looks amazing up on the wall!

We had a great time listening to the ‘Show and Tells’ this week and drew with Rob Bidolph to create our own dinosaurs.

We were investigating the properties of materials in science and can’t wait to get back to the senior science labs for our lesson next week.

Our welly time and PSHE lessons were all about collaboration and team work.

And, last but not least, we had the most amazing weather for Forest School where we went on a bug hunt, swung in a hammock and created spectacular (!?!) meals in the mud kitchen!

I needed some help this week. The boys know that I often take my marking home with me so, as part of our materials topic, we tested different supermarket carrier bags to see which ones I could rely on not to break! We looked at the different types of plastic that they were made from and then counted how many books they could hold before they broke or were full. We also looked to see if there was any damage to the bags.

In order to make it a fair test we used the same type of books and just changed the bag.

And the winner was … the double layer recycled plastic Waitrose bag which could hold 40 books without even a mark! The biodegradable co-op bag was definitely the weakest – it only held 13 books before it broke. We can’t wait until next week’s investigation, where we will look at the properties of different materials.

 

In maths this week we were investigating rules around odd and even numbers. What happens when you add odd and even numbers? What about odd and odd or even and even? What about when you multiply them?

In history we were finding out about the Tudors and Elizabeth I – did you know she was imprisoned very near here at the Old Palace in the grounds of what is now Hatfield House? She was sitting under an oak tree when she was told that her sister Mary had died and she was the new queen!

We also got to smell lots of exciting fruits in our rainforest writing where we came up with WOW! words to make our writing really interesting and exciting.

Please remember we have forest school on Friday afternoon so bring in coats, hats and wellies if they are not already in school!