Portway Infant School
Christmas Assembly
Today we were lucky enough to be joined by some Portway parents and grandparents for our Christmas assembly in the hall. The grown ups impressed us with their musical talent and we could name many different instruments. What a lovely way to come together and sing some well known Christmas carols. Thank you to our wonderful performers for joining us.
We had such a great time designing and creating our own type of penguin. We carefully planned which penguin we wanted to make. We used paper and paste carefully to mould our penguin shape and then chose suitable materials to match our plan and decorate. We are very proud of the results. Have a look at our wonderful photos!
This term we have been learning how to play the recorder with Miss Thompson from Hampshire Music Service. This week we were excited to perform in a concert with a full audience! We hope everyone enjoyed the music as much as we did! A huge thank you to Miss Thompson who has shown such hard work and dedication throughout every Music lesson.
Today was Penguin Day and what a great day we had! We were each given an egg to look after for the entire day. We created our brood pouches using a range of materials to help keep our egg safe, warm and dry. It was so lovely reading some of our favourite books to them during the school day. We then practised our penguin sketching by creating a mood board thinking carefully about the colours that matched our penguin. We finished the day by learning the first part of a 'Penguin Dance' which was made all the more exciting because we were dressed as penguins!
This afternoon we were treated to some expert dancing tuition. As part of the celebration of Diwali, the festival of light, the company West End in Schools presented a workshop based on the story of Rama and Sita. Take a look at the smiles on our faces in the photos! We had so much fun!
Year 2 enjoyed a special Roald Dahl day where we all dressed up as our favourite Roald Dahl characters including the teachers! Following our designs, we selected materials to decorate our Roald Dahl character puppets. We took part in an Enormous Crocodile drama workshop then finished our day with some crocodile art using watercolours. What a fantastic day we had!
Our Literacy lessons have been very exciting this week as we have been watching a short film called Sweet Cocoon. We closely studied the clip and discovered it had no words just music playing through it. We spent the week carefully thinking about the characters and events that took place throughout the clip. We absolutely loved writing the story using exciting word choices and story language.
The teachers were so impressed with the children’s enthusiasm and amazing stories! Well done to all of Year 2!
This term have started learning the recorder with the wonderful Miss Thompson from Hampshire Music Service. We have learnt to hold our instruments and play the note B. We have loved learning lots of new songs to sing alongside playing our recorders or clapping to different beats. We are excited for our term ahead!
Year 2 ventured out into the fresh air for a brilliant day of Forest School. We enjoyed building some amazing dens, concocting a muddy menu in the mud kitchen, creating the perfect habitat for our school snails and creating some natural art based on the style of Andy Goldsworthy. Luckily the sun shone for us all day as well. What a fun day we had!
This week we started learning all about snails. We had a lot of fun exploring the school grounds trying to find all of the different places a snail might like to call home. We are now taking care of them in our classrooms. It's a lot of fun getting them out, watching them and holding them.
This term we have been learning how to play Bamboo Tamboo with Mrs Dixon from Hampshire Music Service and we have been recreating the sounds of the Caribbean using our percussion instruments. This week we were excited to perform in a concert with a full audience! A huge thank you to Mrs Dixon who has shown such hard work and dedication for the last few years at Portway. We will miss her lots!
What a fabulous day we had at The Hawk Conservancy! After a short journey we started our day with sketching and discovering as much as possible about the birds. We followed this with the Wings of Africa display. We had to duck quite a lot! The Secretary Bird made us laugh as it karate kicked a rubber snake. After lunch we had more time to explore before ending our day with the Valley of the Eagles display. The vultures flew so low they almost hit our heads. We had such a wonderful day and were very lucky with the weather!
This week we have made artwork inspired by the story ‘Wow! Said The Owl’ by Tim Hopgood. We started by creating and layering our owls face using lots of different sized circles. We then drew our owl’s bodies and decorated using different chalk and pastel patterns. Don’t they look amazing?
Today was lots of fun! We dissected owl pellets carefully using tweezers and cocktail sticks so we could find out what the owl had been eating. We were really excited to find lots of different bones and then try and match our bones with the examples to find out what each bone was
What fantastic weather we had for our school sports day this year! It was great to see all of the parents and grown ups there to cheer on the children and the children were so excited to see you all too! We started our morning with the obstacle course which involved wearing a penguin inflatable trying to avoid the orcas! Next it was an old favourite; the sack race followed by the egg and spoon race. Finally the excitement rose once again for the water relay and the sprint race. Needless to say everyone had a great time in the sunshine and we would like to say thank you again for helping us to make this such an amazing morning!
This week we created our owl press prints. We had to work through a range of steps to create our art work. First we designed our owl on a whiteboard making sure it was a good size. Then we carefully copied it onto our polystyrene tile using a whiteboard pen. The tricky bit was tracing our design using a pencil making sure we didn't push too hard. Once our tile was ready we covered it with ink and pressed it onto the paper. What a great start to our new topic.
