To the zoo with the Ferradou

We had a great day out at the zoo with our friends from Le Ferradou. Here are just a few photos from the day.

Leaf quilt

At the forest we saw so many lovely leaf shapes that we were inspired to make our own leaf artwork. We used a layering technique with a restricted a palette of forest colours - rusty reds, oranges, browns, yellows and greens.  We tried to leave the outline of the leaf and pattern of the veins white and let the paper show through. After each layer of paint we had to leave it to dry. Once we had layered on about 5 or 6 coats of paint we covered the whole thing in Indian ink. The teachers helped with this because the Indian ink is permanent. The last stage was to wash off the ink. In some places lots of the paint came off too and in other places not so much. The parts where we had left the paper bare took the black ink and showed the shape of our leaves.

Forêt de Bouconne

Our local forest is called la forêt de Bouconne. It is a short bus ride from our school and many of the children in Y2 live near the forest or pass it on their way to or from school. The forest covers 27km². It has a lake and lots of paths for walking, cycling and horse riding. Our trip was all about the flora and the fauna in the forest. The tree species we saw in the forest were oak, pine and sweet chestnut.  The forest is home to lots of animals but they mainly come out at night so we didn't see them. Our guide told us there are wild boar and roe deer. Other smaller mammal species too such as foxes and badgers. The short-toed eagle hunts around the forest.

Here are some photos of our trip:

Our World - a trip across the road to the WILD AREA

To begin our new IPC topic 'Our World' we visited a small wooded area across the road from our school. While we were there we did a mini-beast hunt, tried to identify the plants, trees and flowers and made our own Land Art.

Urban Art Week

Printing and zentangles

In our last art lesson we used photographs to help us sketch fruit and vegetables onto polystyrene printing tiles. We worked hard to create texture by pressing some areas down. We just used pencils to draw into the soft surface. This week we inked up our printing blocks using a roller and then printed the ink onto contrasting coloured card. We used a colour wheel to work out our combinations and we chose colours that are opposite each other on the colour wheel.

Year 2 explain how we've been thinking about arrays

Mateo

 Estela

Lucas

Multiplication with arrays

Can you work out these multiplications?

The bubbles game - as promised

Now you can play at home too!
http://www.teachitprimary.co.uk/shared/free/InteractiveEssentials/NumeracyPrimary/BubbleMultiples.swf 

Poems and art inspired by the sea

We have been reading lots of poems about the sea. Also, to help us get in the mood, we watched some video clips of calm, tranquil seas and contrasted these with wild, stormy seas. We also listened to music from the Four Sea Interludes by the composer Benjamin Britten.

The children made pictures and wrote poetic phrases. 
This is the class poem made by 2A -

Summer Sea

So flat

like an iced pond

a beautiful light

from fallen stars

Summer Sea

ripples hissing onto our feet

slithering to the shore

snaking between our toes

Summer Sea

a reflecting mirror

myself in the water

transparent as an icicle

Summer Sea

still in the distance

unmoving

silent

an emerald blue glittering gem.

Pumpkin Soup game

Click on this link to play a Pumpkin Soup game

Pibrac Market Shopping Trip

At the market we talked to the stall holders (in our best French), looked at all the delicious things for sale (the steaming hot tagines seemed especially tempting) and we bought ingredients for our vegetable soup.

It was very cold (0°C) so when our feet and hands got too cold we retreated to La Sainte Germaine restaurant where we were warmly welcomed with a tasty breakfast. Yum.

Welcome to Pizzalando!

Pizzalando prepares for its grand opening

Fractions

We have been thinking about fractions in maths. We used multilink cubes to show halves and quarters. Then we labelled them with post-it notes  (some of us need to make some corrections to our spellings though...).

Planning our restaurant

Our  new IPC topic is called 'We Are What We Eat' and the entry point is to set up a role-play restaurant. We decided that we'd create an Italian restaurant. The teachers wanted us to plan everything and take responsibility. So we talked about the things that need planning and then, in small groups, we brainstormed our ideas. Firstly, we focused on discussing the name for our restaurant; the dishes that would go on the menu and the equipment required. Here we are working in groups:

Pumpkin Soup

We have been enjoying the Helen Cooper book, 'Pumpkin Soup' this week.
Here is the story:

We discussed the parts that we liked, aspects we disliked, things that were puzzling about the story and any connections or patterns we could pick out. Next week we can look forward to some more drama and role-play, writing in role and illustrating our ideas about the story...
Here are two photos from our role-plays where we pretended to bake a cake in a group of three. 


These three are pretending to wash their hands before baking a cake.

Here Agathe is stirring the cake.