Welcome to Juniper 2!
2025 - 2026
Mrs King/Mrs Brelsford - Class Teachers
Mrs Faultless, Miss Dow - Teaching Assistants
Spring 1
Alive and Kicking
Without a doubt, Juniper have enjoyed their music lessons this half term. Learning the rap ‘Gran Can You Rap’ has been a highlight. I hope you enjoy the video of some of the children performing.
Number day was so much fun in all classes across Birchwood. In Juniper class, we enjoyed spending the day completing maths activities to help develop our mathematical understanding. We have some great outfits too!
Year 2 have had so much fun creating their colourful jumping bean salad. We learned how cous cous is made and how to tell the difference between a fruit and a vegetable.
The children used a range of skills, including bridge and claw cutting techniques and carefully added all of the ingredients. To finish, we squeezed in some fresh orange juice for extra flavour. It looked sooooo delicious!
Thank you to all the grown-ups for bringing in tubs so the children could take their salad home to enjoy.
This week, Juniper Class have immersed themselves in a new test, The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde. We listened to the story and then discussed how the children must have felt when the Giant banished them from his garden.
The children thought of lots of convincing reasons why the Giant should open his garden and allow the children back in. These included ideas such as winter going away, the children being safe, flowers blooming and smelling sweet, delicious fruit growing and birds singing beautifully.
We then created a conscience alley and chose two people to take on the role of the Giant. After this, the children role-played in partners/small groups with one person acting as the Giant and others as a child/children trying to persuade him to open his garden.
What a great way to immerse ourselves in our text and develop our speaking and listening skills!
In Juniper, we have been continuing our learning about abstract art. We explored the work of artist Mark Rothko and learned about his famous colour field paintings. Inspired by this work, we created our own colour fields and even gave them special names. Some impressive work here Juniper and some great artists in the making!
During PE, Juniper have been learning ‘Team Games’. They have been working together to defend an area, as well as developing their ability to work as a team to be successful and score points. The children have been very successful here. Well done all!
This week, Year 2 went on an exciting habitat hunt around our school. We explored the wooded area, the playground and the kitchen garden to see what microhabitats we could find. After our walk, we returned to the classroom to talk about what we had discovered.
We learned that different microhabitats have their own temperature and amounts of light, which help living things survive. While we were outside, we were lucky enough to hear our little local celebrity, Peter the Robin, singing to us! The children shared some fantastic ideas.
This half term, we have developed our maths learning by exploring arrays. We began by using concrete resources, such as counters, to build our own arrays. We then moved on to drawing arrays and linking them to multiplication and division. The children have shown great enthusiasm and understanding as they developed their learning step by step. Well done Juniper Class – what a fantastic start to our maths learning!
In Year 2, we have spent the last few weeks leaning about time. We’ve been recapping our learning on o’ clock, half past the hour, quarter past and quarter to, as well as being able to match units of time. For example, 12 months being the same as one year. This is something that we are going to continue working on, as we move into next half term.
This half term, we have a science focus and an exciting challenge! Miss Haynes has written to us to say that if we can learn all about the basic needs animals need to survive, she will send us a wildlife creature to take care of.
To get us started, she sent us a book by Chris Packham. We have loved finding out about him, learning how much he cares for animals and the environment and thinking about how we can look after wildlife too.
In writing, we are also very excited to begin exploring fairy tales this half term – especially ones with a twist!
