Today has been a good day for learning

And it all happened almost by accident

After breakfast

Esther and William started their early morning task

Fine motor skill practise

Tracing the lines forming 2D shapes

I decided to take each child individually

To see what they could tell me about the shapes

They could both name squares, rectangles, circles, semi-circles and ovals

They could describe the difference between a square and a rectangle

Esther had the best grasp of vocabulary

Confidently using the words equal and length

William told me that the number of sides and number of corners

Are always the same apart from with circles and ovals

Esther and William were both a little shaky

When talking about pentagons and hexagons

I showed them the different shapes

Described their properties

I introduced new words including oblong, quadrilateral, regular and irregular

Esther and William love learning new words!

After their early morning tasks were finished

We went outside in the garden

To hunt for 2D shapes

We found lots of squares and circles

Not so many pentagons, hexagons and triangles

But the hunt was lots of fun

And gave us the opportunity to try out

Our new technical vocabulary

Much later in the day

After tea in fact

We went out the garden again

We took some giant chalks

And I called out shape names for the children to draw

Esther really enjoyed this activity

She finds drawing very easy

And found she could accurately represent the shapes

William struggled

He really did

Try as he might he could not draw recognisable shapes

Not without a lot of help and concentration

After drawing

We tackled the Year 2 Shape Challenge Cards from Twinkl

Again I worked with Esther and William individually

We used the cards like flashcards

To begin with both Esther and William were unsure about hexagons and octagons

By the end of their session they could correctly answer every question

We will go through them again at breakfast tomorrow

But today I think Esther and William made real progress in their learning

They definitely knew more about 2D shapes and their properties

At the end of the day

Than they did at the start

Without hours of planning I taught

They learned

It worked

We worked together

And somewhere along the way

Bea has also learned to recognise a triangle!

Now I know where the children are with their knowledge of 2D shape

I can decide where to take them next

I think we might explore regular and irregular

And play with tessellation

What would you do?

As well as our work on shapes today

We have also been looking at animals

We started with a sorting activity

Esther and William had to sort pictures of animals

Into animals found on a farm

And those found in a zoo

This was a good activity

It promoted discussion about animals and where they come from

Why animals are on farms and in zoos

How some animals can be found in both

After finalising our two groups of animals

We decided to focus today on the farm

Both children had a go at matching adult animals to their babies

They found this task very easy

We then sorted the adult animals

Using different criteria

We began with size

Then thought about different characteristics

Wings / No wings

eggs / babies

feathers / fur (hair)

Esther and William came up with the criteria

And did the sorting

It was a lovely session

Full of teaching and learning

Talking and fun

We had fun

Learning should be fun

It can be fun

And I intend to keep on sharing

And showing

Just how it can be done