Year 2

Mrs Stevens

 Miss Edgar

Welcome to our class page. We hope you will find it useful and it will let you know what we are currently learning about in school.

Welcome to the Oak class page! Here you will find lots of information about what we are doing this term as well as information about our routines, PE days and our weekly 'Star of the Week'! Firstly, let me give you some information about myself:

Teacher Bio

Mrs Stevens

I am now going into my third year of teaching and am very excited for the year ahead! As many of the children will already know, I enjoy a range of sports including walking, netball and football. Being outdoors in my free time is really important to me and I enjoy trips to the coast. I love reading and enjoy exploring books from different authors. My favourite children's author is Roald Dahl, I especially enjoy reading The Twits. I am really excited for all the learning and topics we are going to cover this year in year 2!

The Great Fire of London!

Last half term Year 2 had a brilliant time learning all about The Great Fire of London in 1666. Part of our learning involved researching, designing and building their own Tudor houses!

After all that hard work, what could we do but burn them to have our own 'Great Fire of The Pines.' We talked about how even though it was exciting, we were actually all quite sad to see our hard work burn to ashes and tried to think about how the people who experienced that with their real houses would have felt.

Here are all our pictures of our fabulous Tudor houses and what happened this morning during the burning!

Magical Mother Nature 

English: In English, we are exploring a traditional Brazilian folktale called 'The Dancing Turtle' and will develop our setting description and character development writing with the aim of writing our own versions. We will also be using our learning about animals in different habitats to write non-chronological reports.

Maths: We will begin the half term finishing our focus on multiplication and division skills before focusing on our understanding of fractions. We will learn to understand what a fraction is, recognise different fractions and find halves, quarters and thirds of amounts and shapes.

Science: Our science learning is our big focus this term and we are beginning by exploring living things and their habitats. We will investigate the basic needs of living things and learn about the habitats they live in and how they depend on each other. 

Geography: We will be comparing the Amazon Rainforest with our own local Swinley Forest. Using maps and photos, we will learn about the human and physical features and discuss the similarities and differences. We will also be exploring the characteristics and culture of the four countries on the United Kingdom.

Art: Taking inspiration from the idea of 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle', we will be using plastic materials to create a collaborative weaving piece of art. We will be using this to think about how art impacts us and spreads a message.

PE: In our PE lessons with Mr O'Keefe we will be focusing on athletic skills in preparation for Sports Day this term. We will also be using our jumping skills and techniques to see how we can incorporate these into other games and sports.

PSHE: Our sessions this term will focus on ourselves and how we can best recognise our own emotions, how our actions affect others and how best to take care of our bodies. We will also learn what to do in an emergency and think about how to assess risk.

This week our star of the week is Stanley! 

Stanley worked really hard this week when adding equal groups, pushed himself to write the multiplication number sentence and show his working out when answer the challenge question. 

Great work Stan! 

Homework

Our expectations for homework are as follows: 

Weekly

Reading: Reading aloud with an adult progressing to more independent reading as often as possible. 

Home Learning Activity: Complete the weekly Maths, Spelling and Reading activity. This will be handed out on a Friday and will be due the next Thursday.

The following link has videos which will help you to support your child with the maths tasks: https://whiteroseeducation.com/parent-pupil-resources/maths/home-learning?year=year-2-new

Half-Termly

Project: Each half term, children are expected to complete a project that is linked to their current topic. 

End-of-Year

Spellings: Children should be able to spell all words on the Statutory Word Lists for year 1/2.  

Times Tables: Children should be able to count in 2s, 5s, 10s, 3s. they will begin to learn 2, 5, 10x tables by heart.

Recommended Websites:

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button - quickfire number games to help children learn basic number facts 

http://www.ictgames.com/mobilePage/ - Number games to reinforce the concept of place value

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/supermovers/ks1-collection/zbr4scw - Fun songs with actions to teach many learning concepts in English, Maths and other subjects. This is my new favourite resource!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/ks1-english/z67ncqt - Loads of story telling, poetry and punctuation short films to watch.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/ks1-maths/zhng7nb - Useful Maths short films to watch. Fractions and telling the time would be particularly good ones to try. 

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/5-7-years/addition-and-subtraction - Games from any of the Maths categories will really help your child practise skills they have learnt at school.

http://www.ictgames.com/mobilePage/spookySpellings/index.html - great game for learning common exception words.