Year 2
Welcome to our Year 2 class page.
We cannot wait to get started and hope that you are as eager as we are!
We have a lot to tell you about the on-going adventures throughout our year so this is the place to keep updated.
Here are a few things to know as we start our year together.
Important things to remember:
Home/school diaries: every day- these are important for us as a link to home. Pop us a note should you need to. Record when your child reads so that they can gain stamps to earn rewards as they move along the pathway. Please supply a folder or book bag to keep reading books and diaries together as these are stores in a box within the classroom.
Reading books: every day.
Swimming: Friday afternoon- SPRING TERM ONLY.
P.E: Monday and Wednesday. Children to arrive in PE Kit.
Water bottles: every day
Things to do at home:
Reading is so very important to your child’s cognitive development and especially important to us here in Year 2 as we embark on the final stage of Key Stage 1. Here at Forsbrook, the expectation is that children should read with an adult at least four times per week. We cannot express how important reading to an adult is and how discussion about the story and the vocabulary used within the story can positively affect upon learning. It really is the key to accessing learning and therefore ask that you read frequently with your child.
In our home/school diaries, there are spelling lists of High Frequency Words and Common Exception Words that the children will be reading and spelling throughout their time in our class. Therefore, it would be particularly helpful if you would practice reading and spelling these with your child.
Spellings will be send home on a weekly basis and tested the following week.
In our new term, we will kick things off as superheroes by looking at heroes and heroines of our time and times gone by. The wealth of historical genius throughout the world will be explored as we find out what makes a hero or heroine. Our English lessons will focus on books which link to our theme and our topic lessons will complement the national curriculum by skilfully creating engaging lessons that make learning fun.
Our class page will gain more information as the year goes on so please do not forget to visit us.
Autumn 1
Year 2 have had a busy term in Autumn 1. We have delved into the lives and times of some local, national and international heroes and heroines in our topic. We learnt about Florence Nightingale in our History lessons, discovering what changes this significant individual made to healthcare as we know it as we looked at similarities and differences of hospitals then and now.
Also, we learn about the life of Mother Teresa and the efforts she made on an international scale and thought about our own relationship with God and the positive changes we can make.
Through Clarice Cliff and Josiah Wedgwood, we learnt about our own locality and the effects these people had on the place within which we live and how their life work impacted on us as a locality. We have created our very own artwork taking inspired by their work.
Through Charles Darwin we touched on evolution and learnt about how animals adapt to survive in their habitat. To know more, we explored our Eco Garden and looked for microhabitats and linked these to the needs for survival. This helped us to understand the ecosystems around us a little better and supported our understanding of sustainability.
We even managed to squeeze our trip to Standon Bowers into this term as we learnt how to be our own heroes and heroine. We had an amazing day working as a team and putting our resilience to the test.
In English we have been on a vast journey by delving into texts linked to being a hero in some way.
We looked at the story ‘Supertato’. This taught us how to use commas in a list, how to retell a story using time conjunctions and we also created a story map and added actions to help us to retell the story in detail.
We then uncovered the unlikely heroine that is Little Red in ‘The Last Wolf’ by Mini Grey. This fascinating text not only helped us to use adjectives and adverbs to add greater detail when creating our own ‘twisted’ fairy tale but supported us in understanding the actions that humans can have on an eco-system and the things we can do to offer greater support to our environment. The power of books are immeasurable!
Within our Maths lessons we have been discovering the importance of place value and how this links to addition and subtraction. We have been partitioning numbers into tens and ones, using part whole models to support us in adding a 1-digit number to a 2-digitnumber, we have added and subtracted using the column method and explored the nature of adding and subtracting tens by linking to our understanding of place value.
We ended the term with a fantastic enrichment day learning all about the heroic actions of Grace Darling.
What a term! Here’s to Autumn part 2!
Autumn 2
Land Ahoy!
This term has been another action-packed term in Year 2!
We began the term with a fantastic enrichment day full of laughter and learning all about pirates. We created maps, learnt about human and physical geography, planned landscapes, designed and made a bandana, sang songs, and even went on a treasure hunt.
Next, we learnt all about coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, reflecting upon Remembrance Day. We then explored the story of Treasure Island, during our topic of 'Land Ahoy'. We looked at the characters and used this information towards our character descriptions and we wrote a detailed description about Long John Silver. We then created our very own pirate and wrote a description using all the previously taught skills.
In Maths, we have been working hard to master addition and subtraction. We have discovered that these calculations can be described in many forms as we have learnt new vocabulary. We discovered that addition and subtraction have a relationship and we explored the inverse relationships and the commutativity that addition holds but subtraction doesn't. We looked at how we can solve problems by looking at the links that we can find using our prior knowledge such as number bonds and near doubles.
Throughout our topic, we have explored the life of a pirate. We travelled to the Caribbean to explore the geography of the location compared to our lives in England as we followed Pirate Blackbeard along his journey from England to the Caribbean. We explored the materials that washed ashore on Treasure Island and helped to save Ben Gunn from his solitary life on the island. We also designed and built a raft to help Benn to escape from the island. We have completed a Design and Technology project with the aim of creating a moving trolley to transport the Christmas around our homes. We explored and used wheels and axles to enable the trolley to move.
Not only did we have a busy time during our topic, but we also managed to fit in a fabulous nativity titled ‘It’s a Census Get Me Out of Here’, we look forward to viewing this. We even received a visit from Mr Clause himself and found out that we were all on the good list.
We wish you all a very merry Christmas and look forward to another fantastic term next year.
What an incredible term it has been!
Spring 1
This term we have explored our environmental education topic ‘BEEing Rescuers’. We have used the wordless picture book as our stimulus in English to explore setting descriptions. We wrote detailed descriptions of a busy bustling city in comparison to a magical meadow. This helped us to use descriptive language in a narrative that gave speech to the characters whilst exploring powerful synonyms to show depth of emotion.
In maths, we have been exploring the four operations, looking more closely at the relationship between multiplication and division. We have found some interesting patterns and realised that our times tables are key to understanding both multiplication and division facts.
We have completed a fantastic Design and Technology unit all about food. We began by tasting a range of delicious fruit and vegetables we then designed and made a heathy fruit salad to enjoy at a class picnic thinking carefully and justifying our choices. We also considered how to work safely when preparing food.
Within our RE lessons we have looked at the Christian holy book, The Bible, and the importance of this religious text. We then looked at the Hindu holy book, The Vedas, and explored the structure of the text.
As part of the printmaking unit in our Art and design lessons, we began by exploring prints with the environment. We than made rubbing and used these to make repeating and rotating patters. We looked into the work of Edgar Degas and explored nonprinting by making our stamp. We deigned a motif and then made our very own collagraph stamp to create a fantastic final piece of artwork linking to our topic.
In our Computing lessons, we have worked hard to understand tally charts and pictogram. We have collected data in many ways then we used an online program called J2data to record our information.
Our Science unit for this half term has been all about sustainability. We have explored climate change and worked scientifically to investigate the last effects of greenhouse gases. We have looked into how to be more energy efficient and how we could encourage others to use renewable energy sources.
Spring 2
During Spring 2 an unusual discovery was made, we found that a mysterious, golden egg had been left in our Eco garden. There were so many opportunities for detective work that we were able to really focus our attention, observation skills, inference skills and prediction skills to work out that it must have been a rogue dragon who accidentally left an egg here.
In our English lessons, we wrote newspaper articles that included quotes to warn the local residents of what had happened and then waited patiently for Dr Smith to tell us what to do should the egg hatch. As a class, we read the book ‘The Egg’ and retold this story before becoming authors ourselves and writing a sequel story. In our Maths lessons, we have been learning how to measure in centimeters and meters, properties of shapes and we started to explore fractions.
In our topic lessons, we use the IPads to research famous castles to create a non-fiction booklet that included photographs. In RE we explored the Easter story and looked into the significant events leading up to the death of Jesus. We have learnt about the importance of information technology in our Computing lessons and looked into life cycles, staying fit and healthy and learnt about the basic needs of animals and humans in our Science lessons. In Art and Design, we have looked at many different sculptures and explore the different joining methods used when creating a 3D piece of art. We then designed a dragon eye and used clay to sculpt following our design, we then added color to our sculptures, and they looked amazing! We have enjoyed swimming this term and look forward to receiving our awards.
Summer 1
This half term has been fun filled and action packed. We have explored all that is ‘Weird, Wacky and Wonderful’.
During English, we explored the text ‘The Bear and the Piano’ and learnt all about how the bear felt being so far away from home. We wrote a diary entry as the bear, exploring his wonderful adventure to the ‘big city’. Next, we read the follow on story written by the same author, David Litchfield. This story is called ‘The Bear, the Piano, the Dog and the fiddle. From this story, we learnt all about the importance of friendship. We wrote letters from Hector (the main character in the story) to his friend, Hugo (the dog).
In Maths, we learnt all about positional language using directions, half and quarter turns clockwise and anti-clockwise and began problem solving using the most efficient methods. We love finding the quickest, most efficient way to complete any challenge.
In our Science lessons, we have been investigating the growth of plants in weird and wonderful places. In Design and Technology, we designed, made and evaluated a hand puppet to use to stage our very own puppet shows. We have been exploring a new big question this half term in RE. What good news did Jesus bring? We have used the drama technique of hot seating to unpick this question further. We have been learning how to make music using an online program during our computing sessions. We compared this to using real instruments and explored the similarities and differences.
Children who attended the Art and Design after school club took part in an exciting project working closely with Alton Towers resort. We were given an umbrella and asked to decorate this in the style of Mardi Gras. We had great fun doing so and our umbrella will be displayed at the theme park for all to see.
We look forward to the next half term where we will be learning all about out wonderful world in our next topic, An Island Home.
Summer 2
Summer 2
The focus this half term has been An Island Home, where we have discovered so much about different continents, countries and cultures around the world.
To start the term we took part in three days of celebrations for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee we learnt all about the royal family and about the life and work of Diana, Princess of Wales. We ended the week with a fantastic whole school event and came to school dressed in 90s inspired clothing. We recreated portraits of Her Majesty taking inspiration from the work of the famous artist, Andy Warhol.
In English, we have explored a variety of legends and became authors to write our very own legend. We have explores poetry and wrote poems that included rhyme, similes, alliteration and personification. We even had a visit from an author to inspire us to keep writing. We have learnt all about telling the time and investigated mass in our maths lessons.
In Science, we continued to look at plants. We planted seeds from different fruits and have been observing these over time.
In our Art lessons, we have completed a stick transformation project that allowed us to use everyday items to create a sculpture. Furthermore, we have explored digital and photography within our computing sessions.
We hope you all have an amazing summer!
