Welcome to Year 2!
Autumn Term 1
A very warm welcome to Year 2! We hope that you've had a lovely, restful break and that the children are raring to go! We certainly have a fabulous half term planned packed full of exciting learning opportunities from discovering the poetry of Michael Rosen to playing African drums. We are so looking forward to working with your children this year and hope that, through engaging and interesting lessons, they will progress happily through year 2, cementing their core skills in readiness for key stage 2. If you have any concerns, please don’t hesitate to pop in and see either of us and we’ll do our very best to help.
Best wishes,
Mrs Duckett and Mrs Vivian
AUTUMN TERM LEARNING – FIRST HALF
English
In Literacy this term we will be looking closely at poetry and in particular, the poems of Michael Rosen. We’ll be performing poems, investigating poetic devices like rhyme, alliteration and onomatopoeia and writing our very own poems. In addition to this, the children will be exploring non-fiction writing and will be writing non-chronological reports about Africa and its wild animals. We’ll be revising phase 5 phonics and introducing phase 6 phonics which largely focuses on learning spelling rules. In SPAG, the children will be learning about different word classes (Nouns, Adjectives, Verbs & Adverbs), practising using capital letters and full stops and refining our cursive handwriting.
Maths
In Maths the children will be focussing on place value, specifically working out how many tens and units are in a number. We will also be focussing on number facts and, in particular, number bonds to 10 and 20. Learning these facts will really help the children with their mental fluency. We’ll be using these number facts to practise our addition and subtraction. We’ll then turn our attention to the properties of 2D shapes. We will learn to recognise them, name them and classify them according to the number of sides and right angles.
PE
In PE we will be concentrating on our hitting, kicking and throwing skills in Games and balancing in Gymnastics. We’ll also be enhancing our knowledge of poetry and Africa by making up dances to poems and African rhythms. P.E. will be on a Tuesday and Friday afternoon.
Poetry & Under African Skies
We will be starting this term off with a focus on poetry and I do hope that you will join in at home by reading poems with your children and helping them compile their anthologies. In class 2, we’re extremely lucky to be focussing on the poet Michael Rosen who was Children’s Laureate between 2007 and 2009. His poems are extremely funny and will allow us to focus on language play and poetry performance. After our introduction to poetry, we’ll move on to our whole school topic, ‘Under African Skies’. We’ll be looking at Kenya and exploring various geographical features whilst simultaneously finding out about African animals and creating African music, art and dance.
R.E.
In RE we will be learning about who God is and the Creation. We will focus on our responsibility as humans to look after the earth and the importance of gratitude for all that we have, particularly during Harvest time.
Science
In science this term we will be exploring the different types of food which make up a healthy diet. We will look at the different amounts of food that we need and how each food group supports our bodies and maintains healthy growth. We will use our maths skills to weigh out and compare the different amounts of sugar in drinks and think about the impact that this has on our oral health. We will also explore our bone structures and what our healthy bodies look like inside.
Art, Design and Music
The Children will initially look at how emotions form the inspiration for Jackson Pollock’s work and we’ll be creating our own Jackson Pollock paintings. (I bet you’re glad we’re doing this here rather than at home!) We’ll also look at using oil pastels to create a fabulous African skyline. In Music, we’ll be listening to and singing various African chants and playing the djembe drums. We’ll be attempting four pieces called African cities, African rivers, African mountains and African Countries. Earplugs at the ready!
Special Events and Activities
Friday 20th September - Poetry Slam (children only)
Friday 27th September – Macmillan Coffee morning + Walk to School Breakfast followed by African Songs
Weds 2nd October – KS1 Cinema experience (The Lion King)
Friday 4th October – Year 2 Celebration Assembly
Weds 9th October – Harvest Festival
Weds 9th October – KS1 Reading workshop (10.00am and 6.00pm)
Sat 12th October – Ground Force Day
Mon October 21st – Individual photos
Thursday 24th October – Break up for half term.
Friday 25th October – Inset day (staff only)