Year 2

Sustenance to Sustain

Science: Healthy Eating

Science topic: Animals Including Humans

Year 2 have been learning about what humans need to be healthy; this includes a healthy diet, exercise and staying hydrated. We started off our STEAM work with a discussion. "What do we know about Healthy Eating?" Quickly the children came to the issue of eating a balanced meal. Many of the children already had extensive knowledge about healthy food but some of them had concerns over whether children eat enough fruit and vegetables. Very quickly the children began to investigate - were the children at our school eating enough vegetables? Year 2 decided their STEAM mission was to encourage children at school to eat more veg!

Only 20% of children eat the recommended 5 fruit and veg a day!

Technology: Coding

Algorithms

Year 2 have been learning how to code using Scratch Junior. They also had some special lessons with CLC to learn new trigger and motion coding blocks in order to debug some of the issues with their stories, such as how creating quizzes and implementing collision detectors to learn how different characters interact with one another.

Engineering: Designing a vegetable solution

What can you do with 1 ingredient?

The children were set the challenge of using 1 ingredient in multiple ways. They chose spinach! Together with Stana they started by creating two recipes. A spinach salad and a spinach smoothie.

Cooking with Stana!

Year 2 developed cutting, grating and peeling Food Technology skills. Stana taught the children the bridge grip and the claw grip and how to use knives and graters safely. The children were then empowered to put these skills to work creating a salad and chopping up the ingredients for a delicious smoothie. They carefully thought about the types of vegetables to include and how to cut them so that they could use make use of all the ingredients effectively and how it might taste as a final product.

Eco-Art at Hampstead Heath

Through our STEAM Project, the children have been looking at sustainable ways in creating art. We worked with the City of London and had the opportunity to visit the 'Secret Garden' in Hampstead Heath to get our hands dirty at creating art using the natural resources in the area. We looked at the textures, spaces and colours of the resources in our natural environment and worked together to create artwork of varying sizes. We loved the versatility of the resources we had and impermanence of the artwork we produced.

Fruit Kebabs

Year 2 have learnt so much about the importance of a healthy and balanced diet. They know the importance of eating at least 5 portions of fruit and veg a day and how some children don't always manage this. Through their colourful and fun fruit kebabs, they hope to encourage other children to eat as much fruit and vegetable as they can in order to develop a fit and healthy growing body.

Hapa Zome

Inspired by the Japanese 'leaf bashing' technique - Hapa Zome, Year 2 developed their own print using fruit and vegetables which may otherwise be thrown or discarded. They chose a range of fruit and vegetables which can be found in our own kitchens and which children are not particularly fond of - such as radishes and spinach. They carefully placed them on a white muslin cloth and hit it with a heavy object to imprint the vegetable's natural dye and patterns to form this beautiful finished piece.

Kosuke Araki

The children were inspired by Japanese artist, Kosuke Araki, who saw a problem with food waste in London and transformed it into beautiful practical art pieces.

The children thought carefully about their design and what messages they wanted to convey about sustainable and healthy eating. They were inspired by the natural patterns of fruit and vegetables and colours in our natural environment.

They drew out their ideas on paper with pencil, outlining the patterns they wanted to include before finally moulding their clay by squashing, pressing and pinching to create the shape and pattern they had designed.

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

Paul Cezanne's work on still life wowed the children and taught the children about composition. How can we frame still-life using our eyes? We imagined having an imaginary frame to focus on which angle and how much of the still life we wanted to capture in our drawings. We created paper frames to help us understanding spatial awareness and how to recreate what we can see on paper. We used a variety of sketching skills and techniques to create colour, texture and depth in our own still life drawings.

Maths:

Year 2 designed a quiz to find out how much the year 1 children knew about healthy eating and food sustainability. The results were fascinating and informed the ideas behind our outcome. We used google forms to help compile our results and it gave us a visual understanding of what the Year 1 children know and didn't know about Healthy Eating. Here is an example of our survey:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfyQgU5YzZuah9B9OCcj11bbJhssTluRU2FFyOYXyVEBJ5nbQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

Year 2 also created their own bar graphs to showcase the results, carefully noting the information they needed to include on the x and y axis along with the figures each bar represented.

Cooking for Year 1

Through our survey with Year 1, Year 2 created some ideas to showcase all the information and knowledge they found out about healthy and sustainable eating through our 'Healthy Eating Kitchen'. Through our Food Technology skills, we designed some recipes which are easy, healthy and sustainable to share with the Year 1 children. Year 2 even prepared some of these to share with Year 1 them whilst informing them of facts and information we found out through our STEAM Project using our oracy skills.

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