Year 2
Science Knowledge Can Improve our Opportunities for Exploration and Discovery
We have had an extremely busy term in Year 2 with RAF day and our trip to the RAF museum. We have learnt all about early flight, properties and how this has transformed our world, and have worked really hard on all of our learning.
An Inquiry into Early Development of Flight
During this inquiry we learnt about early flight and how it was discovered. We learnt about the Montgolfier Brothers and how they discovered and then invented the first hot air balloon.
We used our history skills to order keys events on a timeline and combined our Science and DT skills and knowledge to test out some gliders.
We then learnt about the Wright brothers and the first plane and wrote a historical diary from their point of view. During this we also had a visit from someome who worked in the RAF and took part on an RAF STEM day designing two different planes.
An Inquiry into How Properties of Materials Influence their Uses
We then looked at everyday materials and compared and sorted objects based on their properties. We were lucky to take part in an RAF STEM day where we developed our knowledge of flight by designing planes with different tails and wings. As part of this we visited the RAF museum too see a range of planes and knew the types of wings and tails on the spitfires and bomber planes.
We took part in a properties workshop where we had to identify objects and the materials they were made from and then find these materials on the planes and other items in the room. We then used this knowledge in school to think about why those objects were made from those materials, we carried out our own testing with sugar cubes, and then we wrote our own fact file about a material based on our own research.
An Inquiry into How Flight has Transformed our Understanding and Impacted on the World
Our last line was to think about how flight has changed the world. We have time-lined significant advances in flight from 1940 to the present day. As a class we decided the most significant event was the invention of the V2 rocket as this was the first jet engine and made all other flight today possible, including going to space. We have been learning about a significant astronaut and how space flight has led to lots of things we use in everyday life such as batteries, headphones, gym equipment and even baby food. We even enjoyed getting to taste some astronaut ice-cream!
Reading
These are the books we have used this term across our inquiry and reading sessions. We have been focusing on developing our reading stamina and fluency and being able to answer a range of retrieval and inference questions.
