Welcome to Year 2

Mrs Rogerson

Teacher

Mrs Ballinger

Teacher

Miss Williams

Support

Ms Robson

Support

Miss Lyndsay

Support

Important Information

In year 2, children are required to complete their SAT’s in May. In order to prepare pupils for these we work hard in class at encouraging children to become independent thinkers and to build up their stamina to read and write longer pieces of work.

English

The children will be expected to write in full sentences and we are focussing greatly upon presentation and spelling of key words. In order to help your child develop these skills, we would like you to draw attention to their handwriting and their spelling of keywords when they are completing written tasks at home.

Guided Reading

We will be completing daily guided reading sessions, where we will focus on a different text each week. We will be looking at a variety of fiction and nonfiction texts, as well as using our inference skills to investigate illustrations. Our guided read sessions help us build on our fluency, understanding of what we are reading in addition to being able to make predictions, sequence and retrieve information from the text.

Maths

In Maths we will be focussing on number including place value, counting and addition and subtraction. We will be focusing upon counting to and back from 100 and beyond from different starting points. We also need to learn to read and write the numbers to 100 in numerals and words. We will be partitioning numbers in to tens and units. In calculating we will be focussing upon adding and subtracting up to 20 and the number bonds to 10 and 20.  We will be having a strong focus upon counting in groups to support the learning of the 2, 5, and 10 times tables.

Science

In Science we will be looking at the needs of animals, including humans, for survival as well as the importance of exercise, eating healthily and keeping clean. We will continue to practice our scientific skills through asking and answering questions and develop our understanding that there could be different possible answers. We will use our observations and ideas to suggest answers to questions about animals and humans.

 Reading Homework

Please ensure all children bring their book bags into class every day, regardless of whether they have read the night before. Reading books will be changed on a Monday and Thursday. We ask children to re-read books to develop fluency. In year 2 we also encourage the children to write and draw about their favourite books they are reading at home using their reading record. There is a prize each Friday for the child who has tried their best with this activity. We also encourage adults at home to ask children questions about this reading books not just listen to them read. This help with their comprehension skills.

Extra Homework

Every Friday children will receive a list of year 2 words, these are either common exception words or words that contain ‘sounds’ we are learning that week in class. These need to be practised at home each evening in readiness for testing on Friday.

Handwriting is very important in year 2 and we are going to be focussing on improving our cursive writing over the next half term. We will send out handwriting homework each Friday along with spellings. We are asking that parents/carers take some time to sit with their child and encourage them to correctly form each letter using the given examples.

Art

We have been exploring colour using watercolour paints. We identified the primary colours and spent some time mixing them to make the secondary colours.

The children looked at 2 pieces of art work and thought about how the pieces made them feel, what colours the artist decided to use and how they might have applied the paint to the paper.

Using either a ‘warm’ or ‘cold’ colour palette, the children confidently mixed different shades to match their chosen image.

Computing

We are having weekly computing sessions delivered by Ian and Kitty from the CLC and we have loved it so far!

We are creating our own book using ‘Book Creator’. We have mapped out our stories, designed a front cover and added a title. We each have our own QR code which we scan to log in to ‘Book Creator’ and add to the previous weeks work.

We can’t wait to read our final creations!

Health and Wellbeing Day

For this year’s health and wellbeing day, year 2 decided we wanted to relax and feel calm!

We had an energizing yoga session; stretching out or bodies and helping to improve our flexibility and strength, along to the story of ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’ by Cosmic Kids.

The children partook in some mindfulness activities; colouring to calming piano music, followed by some meditation by ‘Peace Out’. We took time from our busy day to slow down and pay full attention to our breathing and just enjoyed the quiet moment.

We are creating our own book using ‘Book Creator’. We have mapped out our stories, designed a front cover and added a title. We each have our own QR code which we scan to log in to ‘Book Creator’ and add to the previous weeks work.

We can’t wait to read our final creations!

English

Year 2 have been focussing on ‘Beegu’ written by Alexis Deacon. We completed a ‘role on the wall’ activity talking about how Beegu might be feeling internally and what she looks like externally.  In pairs we then wrote down our ideas on post it notes and stuck them to our image of Beegu. We used all of these ideas to create a word bank of adjectives on our English Working Wall.

History

During Local History Week, in Year 2 we talked about ‘past’ and ‘present’ and completed a large class timeline with the years of birth of the adults in class. We then worked in groups to organise our own set of dates and corresponding photographs into chronological order.  To make our own ‘mini’ timelines, we then added dates for when Park Brow School opened, when LFC and EFC were established and when Radio City Tower in town opened.

Maths

At the beginning of our Shape, Space and Measure topic, we began by showing what we already knew about shapes by working in groups to sort a selection of 2D and 3D shapes and then attempting to label them.

Architecture

Year 2 have been exploring the work of Kyle Henderson and experimenting with mark making techniques. We experimented with various drawing styles to create interesting patterns and shapes. We explored various mark making techniques including cross hatching, swirls and pointillism. 

Knowsley Safari Park

We had an amazing time getting up close and personal with the King of the Savannah at Knowsley Safari Park. We have been learning all about lions and the African Savannah through our Power of Reading book ‘One Day on our Blue Planet… on the Savannah’ by Ella Bailey.

We had a jam packed day of African workshops in the Safari school classroom, interesting walks visiting the animals found in Africa, lunch watching the fantastic sea lion display and then dodged the birds at the birds of prey show. It was brilliant!

We then got back on the coach to drive around the Safari park; observing a wide of animals and learning lots of information from Nicola, our tour guide. The highlight was seeing Sam the leader of one of the lion prides and one of the lionesses walking right over to our coach!

The Great Fire of London

The children have absolutely loved travelling back in time to learn all about the Great Fire of London! We started by comparing London from the past to what it is like today and used our historical enquiry skills to identify different jobs in the 17^th century. Would you like to be a Gong Farmer?!

We have watched videos, read extracts of Samuel Pepys’ diary and looked at art work from the time to try and get a feel of what it would have been like at the time. All this research has enabled the children to create timelines in order to sequence the events of the disaster and write our own diary entry extracts.

We have also enjoyed reading the story ‘Vlad and the Great Fire of London’ during our guided reading sessions and the children have become very fond of Vlad and his friend Boxton.

Drama Workshop

The children had the exciting opportunity to take part in a Great Fire of London workshop by David from ‘One Day Creative’.

The children used their bodies in different ways to create freeze frames of fire, fire engines, the bakery and Big Ben. They showed brilliant listening skills and team work to create some amazing freeze frames, which they then added movement and sound effects to.

The children then used all their ideas along with props and costumes to create the scene of the fire on Pudding Lane. The added sound effects really helped bring the catastrophe to life!

World Book Day 2020

What an amazing World Book Day we have had! From Dorothy to Darth Vader, Harry Potter to Fantastic Mr Fox; we have had a classroom full of our favourite book characters.

We have a jam packed day, started off by using our problem solving skills to work out some book themed measurement problems. What unit of measure do you think we should use to see how tall the Smartest Giant in Town is? Next, we helped the characters find their possessions using possessive apostrophes and then used our inference skills to work out what each character would say.

All finished off with a relaxing sit down with some brilliant books!