Year 2 Toucans have had a very busy week with SATs. They have all done their very best and should be extremely proud of themselves.

This afternoon we relaxed a little with some Art and are ready for a celebratory party tomorrow!

In our Art lesson today we learnt about weaving. We learnt weaving is used all over the world to make lots of different objects. It links to our topic of the rainforest because people have used weaving for hundreds of years to make different things they need. People use palm leaves to weave baskets, hammocks and many more household objects.

We started by making our looms which is what you weave onto. We then learnt the pattern under, over, under, over and used it to weave. We had to remember to start each one the opposite way. Some of us found it tricky to start with but when we persevered we soon got the hang of it.

In our Art lesson today we finished our Great Fire of London pictures. We drew and cut out silhouettes of houses from black paper. We then used our colour mixing skills to paint the flames and smoke. We were given red, yellow, black and white and had to mix the colours we needed from those.

We then used long brush strokes for the flames and stippled the smoke on. We think they look very effective!

In our Art lesson today we learnt about primary and secondary colours. Primary colours are red, blue and yellow and they are the colours that can’t be made. From these colours we can make secondary colours which are orange, green and purple. Then from these (plus black and white) we can make all different colours!

We experimented with colour mixing for ourselves. Some colours were easy to make and some were trickier. We persevered until we were happy with out colours.

Today we started our new Art topic. Our learning objective was to draw with texture and shading. We shared some ideas and worked out different ways we could use our pencil to meet the objective.

We all first tried to draw a polar bear. We had a guide sheet to help us to draw the correct shape. We then added our own detail and texture.

Next we had pictures of different polar animals. We started by focusing again on the shape and outline. We then added detail, texture and shading. We really tried our best!

Today we finished our posters to advertise our healthy snack cafe next week. We went and put them up around school to advertise it and invite all our friends. We hope you will all come and support us next Friday.

In our Art lesson today we explored printing so we are ready to print our own tablecloths next week. We discussed things we could use for printing like fingers, hands and sponges and then decided actually you could print with anything! We enjoyed practising printing with sponges, forks, spoons, toothbrushes and cotton buds.

We then started to think about what we wanted our tablecloths to look like. We designed our own printing blocks with different fruits on. Next week we will work together as a row group to print our tablecloths.

Look at our funny fruit faces! We made them in the style of the Italian artist Guiseppe Arcimboldo.

In Art we have started to explore the artist Paul Cezanne. We learnt he is a very famous French artist who lived nearly 200 years ago. One of the things he liked painting the most was still life. We looked at a range of paintings and then made our own versions.

First we made a line drawing. Then we talked together about how to choose the right thickness of brush. We decided thick brushes were good for the background and thin brushes were best for adding detail. We also focused on choosing and using the right colours.

Have a look at our photographs to see how we got on.