Year 2

Mrs Short and Mrs Drury

Miss Edgar

Welcome to the Willow 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 us give you some information about who we are:

Mrs Short

I have been a teacher now for 10 years. Before teaching I studied Ancient and Medieval History at Birmingham University. I really enjoy learning about the past. I also enjoy art and I am now the Art Leader here at The Pines. I am passionate about helping children to find ways of relaxing and expressing their emotions through art. I have two children at home who keep me busy. We love going on forest walks together with our dog at the weekends. I also enjoy my lunchtime speed walks with Mrs Stevens! 

Mrs Drury

I have been a teacher for 15 years and have spent all of these at The Pines, with a few little gap years for travelling across America, New Zealand and Australia and starting my family of three children. Our community is the reason that I am still proud to be a Pines teacher and I am looking forward to another amazing year with Year 2!

My favourite subjects are Maths, Science and History. I love when the connections with numbers help me solve puzzles; I enjoy making an organised chaos when investigating in Science, and as my degree at university was History, I am always fascinated by events that happened in the past. This links very much to my passion for conversation! I love it, when as a class, we share and talk about ideas and learning. I am always inspired by the new things I can learn from my class which means this year in our self-led learning, I am extremely excited to find out what you know.

I am also a massive fan of reading anything and everything I can get my hands on. I have piles of books and two overflowing bookcases in my house, and a list just as long of stories I am excited to read. I love being lost in a book and then lost in the movie adaptation – even more so if it is Disney!

My spare moments are always full of spending time with my family and friends, normally over dinner and of course a yummy dessert!

STAR OF THE WEEK

Our star of the week this week is Klara!

In our first week focusing on Florence Nightingale, the children were given a challenge in the 'Workshop' to plan, make and evaluate a lamp. If the children created a lamp and produced some excellent writing alongside it, they had the opportunity to light their lamp on Friday. Klara used her sentence structure well to evaluate her lamp.

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!

Routines

School gates open at 8:40 and the day finishes at 3:10. Our main classroom door for the start and end of the school day is the Year 2 Art Studio door, located on the KS1 playground.

Our regular PE lessons are as follows:

Indoor PE - Thursday

Outdoor PE - Wednesday

On these days, children should come to school wearing their PE kit.

We will change reading books on a Tuesday and Friday.  However, please bring your child's reading book and signed diary in every day, as we will hear them read throughout the week.

PE

Our regular PE lessons are on Wednesday and Thursday. 

We will do PE outside whenever it is possible. Please make sure your child has suitable outdoor PE kit, including outdoor shoes. Children will be expected to wear their PE kit to school on the PE days. 

Current Learning:

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.

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.

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 will take you to videos that may help you 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.