Dear Parents and Carers,

 

We hope you have enjoyed a warm and restful Christmas and New Year.  Year 2 return to the first Spring Term with a few simple changes to the timetable.  For your information, Phonics now takes place immediately after Collective Worship, followed by Maths and then English before lunchtime.

 

In English this week, we have read the story 'The Great Explorer’ by Chris Judge. We are using this narrative as a springboard for writing a letter.  This story links to our Geography and History topic work too. Building on last term, children will continue to learn to identify different word types - nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and determiners. At sentence level, they are learning to use subordinating conjunctions (because, until, when, if) and developing expanded noun phrases (e.g. the bright, yellow balloon) to make their writing more interesting. We will continue to develop handwriting using the Cursive script and basic punctuation such as capital letters, full stops, commas, question and exclamation marks and apostrophes for possession (singular use only e.g. Mum’s car is red). For those who have requested doing more homework tasks to support literacy, please focus on reading every day. This can be reading ‘to’ your child, with them or listening to them read.  While it may sound odd to suggest it, ‘talking’ about the world, having conversations and playing turn taking games also build ability in Literacy.

 

In Mathematics, we continue to build on place value (tens and ones), partitioning and addition and subtraction of 10s and 1s. We are now focussing on multiplication and division using the 2s,5s, and 10s. Building on counting in 2s, 5s and 10s, we are grouping in equal groups (e.g. 3 groups of 5 is 15). This language is important to help the children build a visual understanding of what 3x5=15 actually means.  We know that many of you are keen to practice at home with your children and following many of your requests for ideas beyond using TTRS and NUMBOTS, may we suggest activities and games making equal groups of items in any everyday situation – grapes in bowls, sweets in bags, and counting using 2s, 5s and 10s to find the total. Please continue to practise number bonds to 10 and 20.  These are numbers that equal 10 or 20 e.g. 7+3=10    17+3=20     10-7=3    20-17=3.    

 

 

Our areas of learning for this half term are shown on the grid below.

R.E.	What do different religions believe?
SCIENCE	Everyday Materials
PSHE	Valuing difference
P.E.	Health and well-being
Geography	Hot and Cold Places
Computing	Information Technology Around Us
History	Explorers
Art

 

Please note P.E. is on a Tuesday (indoor) and Friday (outdoor)

 

Children need their full P.E kit in school for the whole half term: Black shorts, white or red t shirt, trainers and a tracksuit for when it is cold. Please, no crop tops, inappropriate slogans or crocs. Please put tape on your child’s ears on Mondays and Fridays, if they have earrings.

 

Please help your children to learn to tie shoelaces because it is difficult for one teacher to tie many shoelaces. Please choose Velcro if necessary.

 

Children need to drink regularly so please provide water in a bottle for the classroom. If your child has a pack lunch, they may bring squash or juice for the dinner hall.

 

Bring inhalers and any other prescribed medication into school with a signed form (see the office) so we can administer correctly and safely.

 

Miss Henderson and Mr Bradshaw.

Year Two Teachers