Welcome back everyone to Year 2. 

Our first topic for this Spring Term is:

Carnival of the Animals

This topic is lovely. We will be looking at different animals and their habitats and deciding why different animals are best suited to particular environments. If you think about a polar bear, can you explain why they wouldn't be comfortable in the Sahara desert which is a hot desert on the continent of Africa? What makes an ocean environment the best one for a blue whale? We will be taking a look at what humans and animals and plants need to survive. Can you think of anything? Is a television vital for survival? Is air? What gases are in 'air'? Are there any of the gases you haven't heard of?

The term 'Carnival of the Animals' comes from a piece of beautiful music from a composer called Camille Saint-Saen. We will listen to each piece of music and try and guess the animal he has written it about. The work was written on 1886 and features 14 movements in all. 

Our second topic for the Spring Term is:

Plants

We start with a block of lesson looking at the weather patterns of three different locations. The locations will be three schools from very different climate zones. One will be a school in Arctic Bay. Another will be a school near Uluru, in Australia, and the last will be our school in Leighton Buzzard. The children will use Google Earth, maps, weather recordings etc to make comparisons between the three different sites. The children will them move onto a block of lessons looking at the kind of plants that grow in these areas and how the plants have to adapt to the very different landscapes and weather in each one. The next block of lessons will be about sketching plants and creating art work through mono-printing. The children will use botanical books to look closely at the structure of a plant and carbon paper and tracing paper to create mono-prints.