Inventors and Explorers
Wishing you a Happy Healthy New Year !
Welcome back to school. I hope you have all enjoyed a relaxing Christmas break and are looking forward to the Spring term ahead. Our topic will be, ‘Inventors and Explorers ‘. This topic will begin by looking at Charles Darwin and the Galapagos Islands, before moving on to look at Leonardo Da Vinci, Columbus and Marco Polo.
Year 2 pupils are assessed in May via national assessments (SATs). These assess whether pupils are meeting their age-related expectation in Maths, English and Reading. Their science and spelling and grammar skills are also monitored.
Our timetable includes; spelling/ phonics, grammar, writing, handwriting and maths during the morning session and reading, science/art/topic/ PE/RE during the afternoons.
English: Over the Spring term we will cover a range of fiction and non fiction texts. We will use books such as; We’re Sailing to Galapagos, The Bog Baby, The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch and more to support our writing. We will also use short video clips about inventions and explorers to inspire non-fiction texts. Our grammar and punctuation foci will be commas in lists, sentence types and past and present tense. I will be teaching the children how to edit and improve their writing by adding interesting verbs and adjectives, changing word choices and using accurate punctuation.
Maths: During the Spring term we will be revisiting some key areas of mathematics covered in Autumn such as place value, using numberlines for addition and subtraction. We will also continue our maths mastery program which aims to build up automatic skills and knowledge for pupils.
Our main focus this term will be: multiplication, division, shape, statistics and fractions. Pupils will be taught skills practically using objects to reason and problem solve, these will translate into jottings and recording maths sentences with understanding.
Reading: In school your child will read at least once a week and have a specific English lesson each week focusing on reading skills. We will cover all reading skills from: Unpicking vocabulary, inferring meaning, predicting the next part of a story, explaining our views, retrieving information and sequencing events. Please record home learning in the reading diary. Also make good use of the Collins Ebooks- the ‘read along’ facility with these is an excellent feature to support your child’s progress.
Spelling: We will continue to follow the Year 2 Spellings guidance and phase 5 and 6 phonics . alongside some of the Year 2 spelling requirements, ( plurals, apostrophes for missing letters and adding prefixes and suffixes to words).
Science : Our science lessons will be very practical as we explore materials and their uses. We will investigate the suitability of materials for various purposes through experiments and investigations. Science Week this year is on the theme of ‘Growth’ this will be a very exciting, hands on time for the pupils.
History/ Geography : We will use Explorers to learn about geography and will make use of maps, photos and ICT to research. During our study of history we will compare changes over time linked to inventions.
Art and DT : We will be developing a range of art and DT skills during the Spring term. We will be focusing on Da Vinci as an artist study and also designing lighthouses and rolling toys.
Computing : Wewill use ‘Scratch Jnr’ to introduce basic algorithms and learn how to create basic patterns of codes, procedures and loops. We will continue to use ICT in all areas of the curriculum to support our learning in other areas.
PE : Our PE session will be on Fridays. Should this arrangement change I will let you know via Class Dojo.
Music : We will continue to follow our program of music –singing ‘I wanna be in a band’ and composing our own tunes.
PSHE : During this half term we will initially focus on New Years’ Resolutions and setting ourselves goals. We will also look at global issues via Fair Trade. As always we will follow our Happy Minds sessions. We will also be focusing on listening and speaking skills.
