Welcome to Hedgehog Class

Hedgehog Class is our Year Two class, where Mrs Vipond is our teacher. Our class page will be updated regularly to share our learning with you; we hope you enjoy it.

Our class topic web and maths medium term plan are located on the class learning page; please use the Hedgehog Class Learning page link below. Also on the learning page are reading and spelling lists and a yearly overview.

Please come to school in PE kit on a Thursday and remember there is no need for pencil cases this term. Homelearning will be set on a Friday and due in the following Thursday.

Term 3

Welcome back and a very Happy New Year to everyone; I hope you're all rested and ready for Term 3!  We'll be staying with London as we learn about one of the most significant events from the past; The Great Fire of London. Can you remember from Term 1 when the Battle of Hastings was?  If so, try to add 600 years and you'll get to the Great Fire.  We are learning about historical events in a chronological order, meaning we started with the earliest and are working towards the current date. We'll have some help from a virtual workshop with the National Archives so we can understand how we know what we do about the fire.  In science we'll be looking at living things and their habitats as well as exploring some simple food chains.  We'll get out into our science garden and see what has started to make it their home so a definite reason for wellies!

Suggested topic books:

Vlad and the Great Fire of London by Kate Cunningham (reading in school)

The Great Fire of London by Liz Gogerly

The Great Fire; A City in Flames by Ann Turnbull

The Baker's Boy and the Great Fire of London by Tom Bradman

The Great Fire Dogs by Megan Rix (Fiction and for slightly older readers)

To help our learning we have been singing along to a song all about 1666.  Please have a listen; it's very catchy! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5eVlKWSHAA

There are also lots of fun games to play but this site is one we have used before and comes via BBC Bitesize:

https://www.fireoflondon.org.uk/

We immersed ourselves into Jack and the Beanstalk and this week we have been learning the story through actions and role-play with the help of some puppet figures!  There are some very scary giants in this class!

As well as not being very good at drawing, children found out I am not great at growing indoor plants! For Christmas I received some seeds that were guaranteed to grow and would you believe it - they are certainly growing!  Each day the plant is getting even bigger and children came back from lunch to find it had reached the ceiling!  It's very similar to our new story - Jack and the Beanstalk.  Look out for new actions next week to help re-tell the story.

Term 2

Homework is for the rest of term/holidays and is due the first Thursday of Term 3.  Remember to practise your best handwriting and spellings; especially if you are writing Christmas cards or thank you letters!

What a performance!  Thank you for supporting our Nativity with help preparing costumes, learning lines and of course, audience participation!  Hedgehog Class parents and family members were the clear winners!!

Our DT lessons have been about wheels and axles so children have designed, painted, constructed and tested out their very own vehicles.  Well done everyone 😊

We're having lots of fun exploring London and this week we learnt a little bit more about Trafalgar Square which we previously encountered in our story 'Katie in London'.  We learnt that Norway gives us a Christmas tree every year to put up in Trafalgar Square and that Julia Donaldson, who everyone knew through her many famous books, has written a poem and now a book about the journey of 'The Christmas Pine'.  Definitely one to look out for in shops and libraries this Christmas!

We had great fun meeting Mark, a representative of the RSPB, when he came to help us decide where to position some lovely new bird boxes.  The boxes were kindly donated to us by the local charity 'Focus in on Life' and we look forward to getting them mounted and ready to receive birds in the coming years.  We even used our directional knowledge that we have been learning in our geography lessons to make sure we could position them facing North.  Thank you to Mark and the charity for their time and resources.

We had lots of spots and yellow for Children in Need Day.  Thank you for all the doations; children have learnt what the charity is about and how the school council chose it for us to support.

We were fortunate to join an author and illustrator, Robert Starling, during our English lesson.  He read one of his books to us, Fergal is fuming, and then taught us how to do simple drawings to help with expression and show how our character is feeling.  It was great fun and we all had a go!  We also got to meet Super Sloth!

Everyone likes to receive a letter so we thought it would be great to write to a Year 2 class in a London school.  We have all written a letter to the children in Lowry Class and hope to get a letter back before the end of term.

Armed with our story maps, children took to the outdoor area to start learning and practising 'The Papaya that Spoke'.  Everybody is having great fun and hopefully they will be able to share the story with you shortly!

Mr Heath teaches computing on a Tuesday afternoon and this term it is all about computer art.  Children have been learning to use Paint and this week they experimented in the style of Mondrian; don't they look great?

Week 1

What a busy first week back we have had!  We enjoyed Aspirational Day on Wednesday where children were fortunate to have two parent visitors from Dstl to help discuss different jobs.  Children also role-played being scientists, worked together to try to build a bridge from paper and wrote their own aspirations on a leaf.  All of our leaves will soon fill up a tree along with those from Badger and Squirrel Class.  In the afternoon we had a whole-school science show which was great fun and full of exciting facts.  All of the photos from the day will be uploaded to the gallery page but here's a selection.

Term 2

Welcome back; I hope you're all rested and ready for Term 2!  We'll be learning all about London as we explore some of the landmarks and re-visit some of the castles we saw in Term 1.  We'll put our navigational skills to the test and try to navigate around London using directional language.  We'll also  be constructing our own mode of transport and evaluating our final design!

Suggested topic books:

Katie in London by James Mayhew

Magical Mabel's adventure in the Tower of London by Wendy Clark

Paddington at the Palace (and the many other books) by Michael Bond

Usborne's See inside London

London Children's Map by Guy Fox

Term 1

What a fantastic day.  From naming our teams, choosing team captains, solving riddles (the farmer, fox, chicken and grain) to team games, bracelet making and creating our new topic board.  It has been a non-stop day of team working, showing kindness, perseverence and teaching ourselves to be resilient.  Everyone should be very proud of their efforts and can certainly say they have been resourceful.  Well done 😊

We've finished our learning on materials and their uses, so what better way to test out properties than to make some slime.  Apologies for the mess!

We have also been enjoying a Friday 'show and tell' where the items must be to do with our topic or science.  We've had lots of castle facts, home-made castles, dragons, visits to see the Bayeux Tapestry and today we even had a modern day piece of armour with lots of properties.  Well done everyone.

We are nearing the end of our topic on castles, so children used all of their knowledge to write their own fact files.  Some people even managed to include our 'words of the day' - fantastic!

It has been really lovely hearing from children about castles they have visited, some recently and some a long time ago.  Thank you for all the lovely pictures and information that has come in from home.

We continued our theme of materials and their uses whilst learning a new word - absorbent.  We agreed that a sponge is an absorbent material and that a raincoat would be terrible if it was absorbent as we'd all get wet!  

We then predicted which material would be the most absorbent, carried out a fair test, wrote down our results and discussed our findings.  Excellent scientific skills 😊

Children were introduced to the 6 Big Ideas earlier in the week and this term we are looking at what it means to be 'Resourceful'.  Hedgehog Class showed resourcefulness in action when they worked together and persevered to build our castle! Well done everyone 😊

We had a look at a piece of artwork by Paul Klee called 'Castle and Sun' and re-created our own abstract version using 2-D shapes and watercolours.  The results were fabulous.

We have started to look at our new book The Egg and learn the actions to the story.  By telling the story we will be able to write it.  Coincidentally we had some visitors to the classroom and they seem to be helping with our inspiration!

We were fortunate to have a visit from The Bridge and they helped us look at and understand God's Creation before we made our own unique creations!

Blue Peter Badges

Back in May we all undertook different pledges to work towards our Climate Hero badge and children helped by turning off lights, recycling paper and planting bee-friendly flowers. Children have all got their badges but adults must apply for their badge card. Please use the link below and enter the code for the old Squirrel Class:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/shows/blue-peter/badge-card-application

Please enter the code HS SP4OLB CH when prompted.

The weather was far too lovely for indoor PE so we went outside for a bit of yoga surrounded by our beautiful countryside.  Thank you for bringing in PE kits - we will continue with our 'indoor' PE on a Wednesday afternoon.