Year 2                     

Autumn 2024          

Welcome to the Year 2 Page. 

WELCOME children and families

 Mrs Law is the Year 2 class teacher for this year and         Ms Holland, Mrs Garry and Mrs Parveen support the   children’s learning.

Your children have settled really well into their learning during the first half term and I hope they have enjoyed a well-deserved rest over the half term holiday. They have certainly arrived back at school with an eager and positive attitude towards their new learning.

The family room doors open from 8:45 until 8:55 and the register will be taken at 9.00. Children should be collected by parent/carer at 3.15 pm. Please remember to inform the office if a different person is coming to collect your child. Please also ring the office to inform them if your child is ill or has a medical appointment.

School attendance is so important and children find it difficult when there are gaps in their learning due to absence. Please be reassured that if your child feels ill during the day, we will contact you to collect them.

Reading

We will change your child’s reading book in their book bag each week on Friday. They will bring home a book of their choice to be shared with a parent/carer or older sibling. Encourage your child to read words that they are able to and talk about what happens in the story or information that they have learned. This book must be returned by the following Friday and we encourage children to take care of the precious resource. Children will also be provided with a phonically decodable book as an online resource. This is a book that your child will have read during the school week and they should practise it at home to develop their confidence. 

 Please ensure that your child practises their reading book for at least 10 minutes every day and try to ask them questions about their reading to check that they have good understanding of what they have read.

Phonics                                        

Most children are now working on a review of all the phase 5 phonics they have learned, and will soon move on to working on the Year 2 spelling words. In Year 2 children become much more confident at decoding words fluently using their phonics knowledge. There is a key focus in Year 2 of choosing the correct phonemes for spelling accurately. It is really important that your child practises the spellings that they are given each week for homework. Their knowledge of spellings builds up over time and the spellings that they are given are based on the ones that have been taught in class during the week.

Some children are working in supported groups to recap phase 3 and phase 4 phonics and tricky words.

Writing

There will be lots of opportunities for writing, both in English lessons and for our learning challenge.

Our learning challenge for this half term is “What is our school made of?”

   This is a science topic about material. Children will be comparing different       objects in the world around them and considering which materials they           are made from. They will learn about the properties of different materials       and how these properties help people decide what things should be made       from. The children will have lots of opportunities to carry out science                 investigations.

  Our English work will be focused around the story of ‘Traction Man’ which      is a story of about a toy that has lots of exciting adventures. Children will          have the opportunity to write their own new adventure for Traction Man.

Year 2 children will be supported to become more independent in developing their own ideas and to be ambitious in their use of vocabulary. During this half term there will be a focus on children  understanding the different types of words that are used to build a sentence; nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions. They will also be using conjunctions to write longer sentences which make their writing more interesting and varied.

You can support your child at home by talking to them about what they have been learning about, and it is very important that they are helped to learn their weekly spellings.

Maths

Children have done lots of work in the first half term on their understanding of the place value of tens and ones in 2-digit numbers. The key focus for this half term will be on addition and subtraction of numbers up to 100.  This sequence of learning starts with children becoming confident with adding and subtracting one or ten to a 2-digit number. We then move on to multiples of ten by using known single digit number facts. The challenging part for children is when they have to add or subtract across a tens boundary  e.g.  36 + 6 = 42.  To support children in their understanding, we use lots of practical maths equipment and the children learn to use pictorial representations of equipment before moving on to a written method with digits and symbols only.

 The Hit the Button website is a very useful free resource which can help your child to learn important number facts.

Children will also be practising their counting in ones, twos, fives and tens - both forwards and backwards. Confidence in counting will support your child in learning times tables facts later on in the year.

We use lots of practical resources in our lessons so that children have a really clear concept of number. Children record their learning in many ways and it may be different from the formal methods that many adults are used to from their own school days. If your child needs to use counters at home to help them with homework, they can use simple household items such as buttons, straws or pieces of dry pasta. It is useful if you talk to your child about using numbers when you are shopping, cooking or looking at the time.

Teacher-parent contact

I am always happy to speak to parents about their child’s learning or any other concerns or matters that you think I should know about. Please try to remember that the morning is the time when I really want to engage with the children and settle them into school for the day so it is better if you try to speak to me at the end of the day. Obviously if it is an urgent matter I will always make myself available to you. Urgent concerns can also be passed on to me by calling the office.

The school calendar gives dates for our parent's evenings where you can discuss your child's progress with me. I will also be inviting parents into class for some workshops linked to our learning. Details of these workshops will be sent to you when dates have been arranged.

Mrs J Law,  Ms A Holland, Mrs Garry and Mrs Parveen