The Courier

Some of the things the children have been learning...

We have set sail with our new ‘Pirates’ topic and discovered that pirates love golden underpants! We have explored rhyme in the story and suggested alternative phrase endings.

In maths we have been comparing and ordering numbers to 20 and beyond. We’ve also started to practise counting in 2’s.

Some of the things the children will be learning in the weeks to come...

Our focus text in literacy will be Mrs Pirate. We will be exploring rhyme further and writing shopping lists.

In maths we will be exploring capacity in maths investigations. We will be writing addition and subtraction sentences relating to one more and one less.                                         

In phonics we have been introduced to blends:

tw as in twin

sm as in smell

pr as in print

sc as in scan

sk as in skull

sn as in snack

nch as in lunch

How to help your child at home...

• Secure number recognition to 20 and beyond
• Practise simple addition and subtraction. (Up to 10 then 20) present in ‘real life’ contexts
• Read signs you see on the way to school
• Sing nursery rhymes, identify the words that rhyme
• Write a shopping list encouraging the children to write the sounds they hear
• Please encourage the children to dress and undress independently

We loved dressing up and sharing our favourite characters from traditional tales, influential historical events and even inspirational African queens! The children had time to share with each other the reasons for choosing their characters alongside completing some writing about them too!

Last Friday, we had lots of fun discussing our book characters and even participated in a fashion show to showcase our outfits.

This week in 1Q, we have been learning about fractions. We investigated fractions by folding paper into halves and quarters, shading them in and labelling them.

In Art this week, we drew and coloured self-portraits.

In English, we explored different traditional tales and took a deep dive into Dragon Dinosaur, using our acting skills to re-enact the story and we verbally sequenced the story before drawing it out on our story maps. We are looking forward to hearing about more traditional tales over the coming weeks.  

Since our very first day in Year 2 we have been counting up the days to help us understand place value. Our target was 100 days with the promise of a party to celebrate. So, 100 days arrived amid much excitement. Balloons, dancing, party games, food and fun on the adventure trail. There might have been a few maths questions thrown into pass the parcel because … why not?   

Wednesday 9 March was Holi day in the Hindu faith and in RE we had lots of fun celebrating the festival of colour. Using brightly coloured paints in a spinner we created some fabulous colour wheels to represent the colour fights. 

In Geography, the children have done independent research to find out amazing facts about the animals of the rainforest. 

Children in 2W have consolidated their understanding of odd and even numbers and used this to solve challenging problems such as:

Does odd + even always = odd, does odd + odd always = even?

The investigation, setting out to prove these statements and conclusions were impressive.

Children in 2W learned and used the spelling rules for changing singular words into plurals this week. They have strong understanding that most words you simply add s, that words ending in s, sh, ch or x have an es plural ending and that most words ending in a y replace it with ies.

Year 2 pupils are taking part in a national competition for growing potatoes. We have been 'chitting' sample potatoes in the Science room so that we have tubers ready to plant. We will be exploring what potatoes need to make them grow. We have two varieties, Casablanca and Shannon and we are hoping for a good harvest in about 15 weeks.