The end of a fantastic year

This is quite possibly the last post for this blog, we have been fairly slack recently as we've been concentrating on other things but a fantastic time has been had all year.

There have been far too many highlights to mention and too many classic comments have been forgotten. Next year I feel I'm going to have to start writing down some of these comments to remember for years to come.

One other new idea was a year book, this one contains a few photos and comments about the children and the last year.

Thanks to everyone who has made this year so memorable. It's been legendary!

 

Class RB (Year 2) 2011-12 by Springfield Primary School | Make Your Own Book

Poppy's entry for the five sentence challenge

One day two pritty girls were in there house but suddenly they found a ear-ring on the flor and acadently chucked it out the glass window. So the two girls had to go fishing to find the ear-ring of cors the pet to. So they all got there nets out two for the girls and one for the pet. So they fished and found the ear-ring. The end.

Hayden's entry for the five sentence challenge

One day ther was tow little kids going crabing. They did not find no crabs but then the tow little kids saw sumthing it gigld and gigld. One of the kids stept on sumthing. He hated to go to hospertol. Soon the dockter found out what it was it was a crab a big, red and feroshus crab.

A class song has been written

I honestly can't believe Class RB have been able to write their own song, with music, in such a short space of time. Everyday the children constantly impress me with their ability to listen and then take on a challenge.

 

Even though we want the song as a surprise for our class assembly on Thursday, I think we may be able to give you a snippet of the chorus or bridge a little later today.

Another Great Week Ahead

We have another fun packed week ahead of us this week with lots of activities planned.

After our successful Year 2 Music Festival last week we'll be performing the songs infront of friends and family on Wednesday so there'll be another chance for people to experience our fantastic singing.

Last week we were getting to grips with a special sort of Literacy lesson called "Screen to Page". It involved watching sections of the film Mulan and then using all our senses to write about it. We found it really enjoyable and discovered that our writing improved as well. For that reason we've got another week where we'll be concentrating on sound and bringing everything in together to create a fantastic piece of writing.

Finally, we're all very excited because it's our class assembly on Thursday, we're focusing on our blog and especially all about how it's helped us with our learning.

Photo's and examples of work will follow.

Class Assembly Thursday 22nd March

Our class are doing our class assembly on Thursday 22nd March. We've been going through all the work completed over the last few months and selecting all the best bits to show the parents.

It promises to be a fantastic and packed 30 minutes with, we hope, some great surprises .

Feel free to leave a good luck comment here so we can show everyone how many people follow our blog.

A picture can literally tell a thousand words

These last few weeks our work in class has revolved around a picture painted nearly 400 years ago. It is called "Still Life With Drinking Horn" and after discovering it was painted in the 1600's Class RB wanted to find out more about that time.

We used a website called Popplet to share with each other what we already knew and then what we would want to learn. We all worked on this in the ICT room and were amazed that we could all work on the same piece of work at the same time and see each others thoughts straight away.

After rearranging the questions the children then went home and found the answers through different ways. Google appeared to be the most popular method of finding out information though.

You can see the result below 

Lucy plans a story after looking at a picture

After studying a painting by Willem Kalf, called "Still Life with Drinking Horn" the class planned a story to explain where the objects came from.

This is Lucy telling us her plan for her story.

listen to ‘Lucy's reading from her story plan’ on Audioboo

The music festival was a great success

Yesterday's music festival was a great success with six schools from Chelmsford coming together to put on a fantastic performance. I wont give too much away as the children have been working hard to put their experience into words for you. We'll finish it off tomorrow and they'll post it on here as soon as possible.

In The Garden - A Five Sentence Challenge entry from Wesley Tyson

In the sunny days the black spotty ladybirds come to hide. In the Summer you see loads of pretty butterflies. In the Spring gloomy leaves turn to orange or red or brown to fall off trees. If you're lucky you can find some of these creatures I've told you about. So next time try to find some creatures I've told you about.

In The Garden - A Five Sentence Challenge entry from Lucy Armstrong

In Summer you can see butterflies coming out of their cocoons. Also you can see wonderful flowers growing and fruit growing in the trees. You can have ice lollies because it is so warm. You can go on holiday in Summer. Butterflies are pretty.

In The Garden - A Five Sentence Challenge entry from Paige Crozier

In the garden I can see flowers blooking up to the sky. Suddenly a rabbit appears from the bush in the distance. A streaming hot sun appears in the morning. The rooster goes and my clock goes too to wake me up. Barbeques you can have.

An Exciting Week Ahead

It's the beginning of another week and this one has just as many exciting activities as usual, if not more. This afternoon we'll be joining six other schools to put on one massive performance of "The Gingerbread Man" at a local church. We've got the forth installment of our "Body Care Workshop" on Thursday and we'll be starting "Screen to Page" in our Literacy. It is going to be a great week.

Stars of the Week

Our last post for this week is going to be about our superstars.

We don't always have superstars every week but this week three people have really stood out from the crowd.

First of all I would like to introduce to you our Literacy Superstar. This boy always works hard because he wants to do well and improve his writing. Shall I tell you who it is? Maybe I'll leave it until I've told you a little about our Numeracy Superstar. Our Numeracy Superstar of this week is someone who has already received the "Superstar of the Week" trophy. This person is Will Anderson. He has proved to be very quick with his mental maths and during Science was able to change receipes quickly in order to alter the amounts of milk and vinegar so he could make plastic.

Back to our Literacy Superstar. I should put you out of your misery by telling you the winner this week is Ethan Rackham.

Well done to both Will and Ethan. But now, drumroll please......

The SUPERSTAR OF THE WEEK is..............

wait for it

almost there

it's

Ben West.

His ideas throughout the week and constant desire to do well is an example to everyone. I do believe he has now won it twice!

Great Fire of London Houses

We have had another successful Design & Technology session today. The children have previously created prototypes, reviewed them and learnt how to measure, saw and join wood correctly in order to create timber frames for the models.

They are now at the stage of creating their actual models and everything is coming along nicely. Here are a few pictures to demonstrate.

Great Fire of London Houses

An Investigation into Shape Symmetry

At the beginning of this lesson we started by having a quick game of guess the shape. Mr Bird gave us some clues for us to then draw the shape and write its name underneath. We then continued onto our main lesson which followed on from our work with mirrors and symmetry. We were set a challenge to find all the lines of symmetry in different shapes. Some tables had squares, rectangles and triangles while others had other shapes like hexagons, octagons, pentagons and many others.

Quickly, the children drew round the shapes onto paper and got to work cutting them out and then folding them in order to find all the lines of symmetry.

After that we stuck them onto a board to show how many they had.

Right at the end of the lesson we looked at all of the shapes and found a very interesting pattern. Do you know what it was?

Time To Vote For a Name

A little while ago our class had a think about a name for our Quad Blogging group as we thought the name "Quad 47" was a little boring. All the children's imagination flowed and they came up with many different ideas. After reading the comments left on our blog we had another think and agreed that we shouldn't call ourselves "Best Bloggers" as we couldn't be sure we were the best. The girls didn't really want to be called "Cool Bloggers", instead they liked "Beautiful Bloggers" to which the boys instantly replied "NOOOOOOOOOOO!".

Strangely though, everyone in the class liked the name "Ninja Bloggers" but for different reasons. Some just said "Ninjas are cool" where others decided that "Ninjas are like the film Kung Fu Panda" which they enjoyed. One girl, Paige, said that she liked the name because "Ninjas wear black and white" yet the majority just explained that they liked ninjas!

The name Quad Kids also made the children's faces light up and they said "oooooohhhhhhh!" because I think they really liked that one.

In the end we liked the following three names

Quad Kids

Ninja Bloggers

Super World Bloggers

Can we request that the other schools reply and let us know their favourite so we could have a big vote. We've started one on our blog with the three names so we can see which is most popular.

Science Day

Today has been Science Day at Springfield Primary School. We have been making plastic from milk, bouncing balls out of glue and have seen some other fantastic experiments. Once it has all finished we'll write up a little report with some other photos and films.

What has been your favourite science experiment?

A New Idea is Formed

As a direct result of one of the comments on this blog we have decided to create a library of video and audio definitions.

Everyday we are using  new language which we have to learn and know what it means. Our first word that we had to define was "symmetry". We found it quite difficult to put it into a sentence that made sense but we think we have cracked it. Tell us what you think the video will arrive soon.

Symmetry - Fun with Mirrors

In numeracy we have been having fun with mirrors. We have discussed and learnt all about lines of symmetry and how we can put a mirror on them to reflect the pattern.

Here are two clever boys, Matthew Medori and Alfie Forster, working super hard on their symmetry work together. In fact, many of the class found the work ultra easy after they learnt the trick of checking with a mirror. 

Here is Ahana's work.

We loved doing symmetry!

Some audio files of our ideas

A New Name

At the moment our blogging group is called "Quadblog 47" which we think is a very boring name. We believe we should be called something more imaginative to make it more interesting for the reader of our blogs. We had a big talk about it in class and came up with many ideas such as "Primary Bloggers", "Worlds Best Bloggers", "World Bloggers", "Super Blogger", "Primary School Bloggers", "KS1 Primary World Bloggers" and many more.

This is what Mason has to say

I think we shouldn't be called Quadblog 47, I think we should be called something far more interesting. I think we should be called a much better name. I have got a brilliant name. I think it should be called KS1 Primary World Bloggers.

What do other people think?

An Afternoon of sawing and gluing

Our topic this half term is "Back in Time" so we have been looking at many different items over the last few weeks. The one aspect that has really caught the children's imagination and interest though has been The Great Fire of London. They loved it so much Mrs Esser and myself had to amend the plans so we could do more of it.

In Design and Technology we decided we wanted to build model houses from 1666, the time of the great fire, and have doors and windows that would open. After completing the planning and prototype stages we are now building the actual model houses. Some of these models will have a wooden structure so we have been linking in our Numeracy to measure the wood accurately in order to cut and glue the pieces the best we can.

Photos will follow shortly.