Crookhill Primary School

Class 2 have been reading the book Dirty Bertie and talking about how easy it is to spread germs. We did an experiment showing how far germs can spread by blowing pom poms across the classroom. We were amazed how far they flew.

To remind us to wash our hands we have made model germs to keep in our houses.

Class 2 have spent this week exploring how materials change shape. We began by looking at which materials we could change just by pressing, squashing, pulling and rolling.

W tried our hardest to get the balloons to keep their new shape after blowing them up but as soon as we let them go they just flew around the room.

Today we looking at how we could change materials in another way. Instead of just applying physical force or pressure we looked at the effect mixing solids and liquids had and what happened when we heated materials.

Yep, you guessed it! Cakes.

By mixing the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients the consistency was changed and no matter how hard we tried we could not change it back.

We were quite pleased though because we were looking forward to eating the cakes.

As part of our PSE topic Year 2 have designed and made their own healthy meal. They decided to make wraps and thought of lots of ways to make them healthy like not using so much cheese and adding lots of ingredients such as peppers, tomato, salad and cucumber. 

They had to prepare all the ingredients themselves. What a lazy teacher they have!

We did a great job. They looked fab so lets hope they taste the same.

Enjoy Year 2! 

This term Year 2 are looking at different materials. We have sorted and identified a range of materials. On Friday we looked at natural and man made materials. We collected lots of different natural materials from our Forest School site.

Because of our frosty weather we decided to paint them white and make a beautiful winter collage out of our natural materials. Check out our pics below.

These will look beautiful above our Polar Regions display. Keep checking to see what else we have been learning.  

After our 'Little Nativity' we got dressed into our lovely party clothes.

Once the music started there was no stopping us!

We danced...

and danced...

and danced!

Until it was time to play games.  We played Corners.

Musical Bumps.

And Pass the Parcel.

We had lots of delicious party food.

  We just about had time for our traditional Conga around the WHOLE school.

This week is Creativity week. We are doing lots of work around Traditional Tales with a twist

This afternoon at Crookhill all our parents were invited to come and join us in a Twisted Tale activity. Year 2 have been looking closely at LIttle Red Riding Hood and reading lots of different versions. Our favourite is the film Hookwinked.

Our parents helped us create different scenes from the film to match the stories we are writing in Literacy.

We created some fabulous scenes, Take a look below. Do you have a favourite?

Class 2 were invited to help Ground Works North East. Over the past few months GWNE have spent time on a regeneration program on the Croft estate in Ryton. Lots of children at Croohill have enjoyed the new park and the new play equipment.

Class 2 were asked to help plant bulbs in the park to help it look beautiful in the spring.

We were very lucky to have some parents come along to help us. They were very green fingered!

Sarah from Ground Works was very grateful for all our hard work and we were very proud of ourselves. A big thank you to all our parents who gave their time this afternoon.

We can't wait to go back in the spring and see all of our hard work blossiming in the Croft park.

Today, we kick started our Creativity Week off with a special production of Jack and the Beanstalk.

Looking pretty normal so far?

We were all very excited to see Buttercup.  She had some super dance moves.  We liked the way she moooooooooooved!

Can you spot what flavour milkshakes were on offer?

It all still looked like the original Jack and the Beanstalk UNTIL...

They climbed the beanstalk and ended up in...

NURSERY RHYME LAND!

Oh no it wasn't just any old Jack and the Beanstalk, it was Jack and the Beanstalk with a twist!  All the nursery rhyme characters came to life! 

Everybody loved it including Miss Welsh and Miss Teasdale who couldn't resisit joining Numpty in a bogey on down with Squire Bogey!

But in true panto style it all had a happy ending.

Please look in the gallery for more pictures and keep checking the website next week for more Twisted Tale fun from Creativity Week.

Class 2 and 3/4 were in for a spooky surprise when we paid a visit to Ryton Towers Residential home. They had organised a story teller to tell us some spooky stories.

Our children at Crookhill are very brave and weren't scared.

The staff at Ryton Towers had kindly prepared some delicious treats for us all.

They were delicious.

Today was the last day of our TOLC project. We were very sad but determined to make the most of our last day. We began the day by searching for minibeasts and collecting them in petri dishes and bug pots. We found some amazing stuff including a rather fat grub hiding in some rotten wood.

We took all we had found back to the classroom to look at them under the visualiser.

Joe had a special treat for us today. He had brought us some more exotic bugs like an African snail, locust, a giant millipede, a stick insect and Adam's favourite - a praying mantis.

We all got to have a hold and look at them magnified on the white board under the visualiser.

This afternoon we pulled together all the work we have done over the past 5 weeks and prepared for our parents arriving. It was great to see some many of them there. We got to show where our special places are in the school grounds and tell them about all the things that live there. We had plotted important places on a map and showed our parents how to find them.

At the end of the day, we took the parents to the classroom and showed them our fabulous creepy crawlies. Joe presented us with certificates to say we had completed our project.

What a day we have had at the outdoor classroom. It was raining very heavily this morning but that did not stop us being fantastic 'Nature Detectives!'

Over the past 2 weeks we have been looking at life cycles and the food chain. We had lots of questions about where our food comes from so Simon kindly brought us in an amazing treat. We had a pair of grouse which we were able to see being prepared and cooked. We cooked them on our campfire and they were delicious. We ate the lot! We were just like the Greg family from Roald Dahl's The Magic Finger.

This afternoon we had to create our own food chains. We needed to think carefully about which animal would be at the start of the food chain and work our way up.

When this was done we explored the area to help our animals defend themselves in the wild by finding them some camouflage.

We now know how and why animals need to camouflage and how they do this successfully.

Next week the parents of Year 2 children are invited to join their children at the outdoor classroom at 2.30pm so they can share everything they have leared in the last 5 weeks. They have even set up a fantastic activity for you to complete whilst you are there.

Hope to see you there to help celebrate the children's achievements this half term.

Day 3 at the TOLC project and we really are becoming Nature Detectives. We started our day thinking about life cycles of the things around us. We managed to create some great life cycles of a frog, a butterfly, human beings and many other things. We then used our new knowledge to find the life cycle of something in our special place. We found sycamore leaves, helicopters and sycamore branches all in the same place which showed us the life cycle.

Next we started to think about the food chain. We made our own food chains to show we knew who the primary and secondary consumers were.

This afternoon, we collected lots of natural things around us so we could take a really close look at them under the digi microscope.

Trevor from the CLC showed us how to make our products into a digital video using the microscope.

Year 2 have came to school ready for a Dahlicious Day. This is the first time there has been a Dahlicious Day and there are plans for one every year on September 30th in order to raise money for one of his children's charities. This term we have been reading some of his fabulous stories including Fantastic Mr Fox, The Magic Finger and George's Marvellous Medicine.

Take a look at our amazing outfits.

Can you guess who we are?

This afternoon we made some oragami foxes and a Fantastic Mr Fox mask. We looked very scary.

I'll be uploading all the photos to the gallery soon so please take a look.

The focus of todays session was learning how to make a map of our surroundings by identifying different landmarks on our site.

We began the session by finding our own special place.

Some of us chose well hidden places that were great for climbing and others chose a much more quiet and peaceful place.

We talked about how we could keep our special place special and decided that keeping it free from litter and rubbish was a good idea. We all took part in a big litter sweep and were given certificates for all of our hard work. We sorted our rubbish into different piles for recycling and weighed how much of each type of rubbish we had. We learned about how long it takes for different types of rubbish to decompose. Did you know that it takes over 1 million years for a plastic bottle to decompose?

This afternoon we got busy mapping out our school grounds. We learned how to make sure objects were positioned correctly on our maps and were well labelled. We located our special place and tried to use the maps to find each others. After we had mastered this we measured the distance in metres between different areas on our map. This was tricky but we got there in the end.

We are looking forward to next week where we will be identifying different trees on our site and a variety of bugs. Watch this space for pictures.

Today was the first day of our TOLC project. Year 2 as well as being Nature Detectives are also going to be conserving our 'wild place'.

Joe and Simon have built us an amazing outdoor classroom so we can be outside whatever the weather.

We began today enhancing our team building skills. It was tricky but with lots of practice we managed to complete all the activities.

Getting ourselves into height order without speaking was tricky but with a little help we got there in the end.

Simon thought we looked like an artistic bunch so thought we would be up to the challenge of making our own natural art. Some of us made mud paintings which were messy but fun. We could even use natural materials such as grass or flowers to add colour to our pictures. Some of us made collages but were tricky to get back to the classroom.

This afternoon we took photographs of our art and pictures of things we thought made our wild place wild. Michael from the CLC showed us how to put our pictures into a Photostory. He has promised he will upload our finished work to the site soon so keep checking the website.

We can't wait to find out what we can do next week. Remember you need old clothes, wellies, waterproofs and a water bottle on Monday.

This term Year 2 are going to become Nature Detectives. We have begun to learn about Lord Baden Powell who started the Scouting movement in the late 1800's. He is our inspiration for engaging and exciting outdoor activities.

We are taking part in a 5 week project based on Technology, Outdoor Learning and Conservation (TOLC). In preperation for this we have already done lots of activities. On Wednesday we spent part of the afternoon in our school grounds documenting what living things we could find looking carefully at where we found them.

We recorded each thing we found and today presented our results in a table.

This afternoon we had a music workshop all about nature and the world around us. We used instruments made out of coconuts, goats toe nails, horse hair and other natural materials.

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