Year 2

Mrs Taylor and Mrs Elkins

 Miss Velzian and Mrs Boothman

Welcome to the Sycamore 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 Taylor 

I am now going into my 16th year of teaching and am very excited for the year ahead. I have three daughters, a husband and a guinea pig at home which keeps me quite busy! When I have a bit of time to myself, I love to visit my family, bake cakes or go running. I really appreciated some of you cheering me on when I ran the Bracknell half marathon recently. I have always loved reading. When I was younger my favourite author was Dick-King Smith and I really loved his 'Sophie' books. 

The Rainforest

This term we will be learning all about habitats around the world before 'zooming in' on rainforests. We will have a heavy focus on science knowledge about what animals need to survive, the importance of their habitat and different food chains that can be found in a rainforest. We will also look carefully at the geographical features of a rainforest before using the medium of collage to create a collaborative piece of rainforest artwork. 

The Rainforest

English: In English, we will focus on writing to inform. We will start the term with writing instructions for how to wash an animal of our choice. We will work on using imperative verbs, command sentences and adjectives to add specific details.  We will also write a recount of our school trip to Beale Park, focusing on using conjunctions to join ideas, time adverbials to sequence events and adjectives or expanded noun phrases to give more detail. 

Maths: We will recap all calculations as well as learning how to recognise and find fractions, collect and interpret data, tell the time and use a range of measure.  

Science: We will look at different habitats around the world before focusing on rainforests and learning about food chains. 

Geography: We will find out the physical features of a rainforest before conducting some fieldwork to help us compare Swinley Forest with The Amazon Rainforest. 

History:  

Art: We will work together to create a collaborative rainforest collage. 

DT: We will learn the basics of food hygiene before designing and making our own snacks. 

PE: In our PE lessons we will be focusing on attacking and defending skills before starting some athletics work in preparation for sports day. 

PSHE: Our sessions this term will focus on 'Being My Best'. 

Computing: We will be learning how to collect and present data using pictograms, create binary trees and create non-binary databases. 

RE: We will consider the questions 'why do some people follow religious leaders and teachings?' and 'how do some religious beliefs encourage people to care for the world?'. 

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.