Year 2
Welcome to Year 2:
Barn Owl Class & Tawny Owl Class
Miss Saunders and Miss Annand will be teaching Tawny Owls this year and Mrs Harrison is the class teacher in Barn Owls Class.
Welcome
Welcome to year 2! We hope you find the information below useful as your child starts the year with us. This information will help you support your child at home with the organization of their week and their learning at home.
Key Times
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Homework |
Homework will be set every half term. Your child will be asked to work on a number of projects, designed to enrich the learning taking place in school. This approach to homework has been designed to enable you and your child to work together in a creative way and to develop a love of learning. Please see the homework document for Autumn. |
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PE |
In year 2, the PE days are Tuesday and Wednesday. Please ensure that your child has their PE kit on this day. |
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Trips |
We will be visiting a local library this half term to find out about different authors and explore a range of different books. We would welcome parent helpers who hold Kent House DBS checks, so please contact the class teacher about this. |
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Inspire Workshops |
The inspire workshop will be held in Autumn 2, we would welcome parent involvement in this, and look forward to seeing you then. Please look out for further information closer to the time. |
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Key Times |
The school gates open at 8:30 in the morning. In KS1, children will be dismissed at the end of the day at 3:20. |
Homework
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Read it |
Research it |
Make it |
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This half term we will be reading the book: ‘The Snail and the Whale’ by Julia Donaldson. Your task is to read other books by her that you didn’t know about before and write about why you liked it. To help you, some that you may not have heard of are: The Highway Rat, Zog, The Singing Mermaid and Princess Mirrorbelle amongst many others. The local library is a great place to sit and enjoy a story. Complete a book review for at least one of the books that you have read and tell us if you would recommend it to a friend. Be detailed and informative in your report. |
Our IPC topic for this half term is ‘Who am I?’ Your task is to find out about and research the country that your family comes from. Create a poster, booklet, or leaflet all about the country. Questions to think about: • Where in the world is the country? • What is the climate like there? • What is the traditional food? • What is the traditional dress? |
To link with your ‘research it’ task, your task is to make your own poster, booklet or leaflet about your country. Try to: • Make it eye-catching and colourful. • Include interesting facts and technical vocabulary. • Include features of non-fiction styles, e.g. sub-headings, captions and diagrams.
You can choose to present your facts you have researched in any way. Try to be as creative as possible. |
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Practise it |
Write it |
Design it |
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Spend some time practicing the skills we are learning in school: * Practise adding number bonds to 10, 20, 50 and 100. * Continue practising your new spellings each week. * Read to an adult every evening and record this too. * Practise skip counting forwards and backwards in 2s, 5s and 10s from 0. * Practise counting to and across 100 in 1s, 2s, 5s and 10s – forwards and backwards and from any number. * Use all of the centre pages of your reading record diary to help you learn all of your phonics sounds. |
Linked to your ‘design it’ task, your writing task is to now write about your new character or include them in a short story. You might want to include rhyming words or phrases in your story. Maybe you want to re-write a well-known story introducing your new character as a twist. Use your imagination! |
Can you create and design a brand new character that Julia Donaldson might use in one of her upcoming stories? Draw and label your character to help you write about them in the ‘write it’ part of the homework. Is the character friendly, scary, shy, fearsome? What features will you give your character so that we understand how you want him/her to make us feel? Think about how Julia Donaldson gave the Gruffalo purple prickles all over his back so that he was scary! |
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A note to parents, Over the course of this half term please work with your child to complete the above. Each of the activities has been designed to support, enhance and enrich an aspect of the curriculum. We are looking forward to seeing the results of your work together. |
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What are we learning?
In literacy we will begin by reading “The Snail and the Whale”. The story tells of a journey that the snail takes around the world by riding on the back of a whale. Together they must overcome some problems and they become good friends. Through this, children will explore and discuss teamwork and friendship. In maths, we will be focusing on place value, and the four operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. We focus on these for a term so that children have a good foundation of number skills before moving on to other areas of mathematics. Our topic learning is entitled ‘All About Me’ – learning about ourselves, what makes us special and how we relate to each other. We will also be focusing on our school values which includes unity and promotes collaboration.
How can I help at home?
One of the key ways every parent can help is to ensure that your child is at school every day and on time. Other than this, the main way you can help is by ensuring that your child reads every day, for at least 20 minutes – this can be with you, or on their own, but it is the most effective way of ensuring that your child progresses and learns outside of school. Children also have a Mathletics login – please encourage them to use this frequently, as it will really help with their quick recall of mathematical facts. Please also log into your child’s LiteracyPlanet account.
If you have any questions, please talk to Mrs Harrison or Miss Saunders, or you can arrange a meeting at the office.
Thanks,
Miss Saunders, Mrs Harrison and Miss Annand
