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.
* Reading books: every day.
* Swimming: Friday afternoon- SUMMER TERM ONLY.
* P.E: Wednesday and Thursday. 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.
You will find a copy of the termly spellings and the KIRF (Key Instant Recall Facts) on the school website and a copy will be uploaded to Seesaw.
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 skillfully creating engaging lessons which make learning fun.
Our class page will gain more information as the year goes on so please don’t 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 art work 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 in this term as we learnt how to be our own heroes and heroines when we need to be. 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 began the year with a whole school text, ‘While We Can’t Hug.’ This story helped us to understand what is happening in the world right now. The two characters within the story, Hedgehog and Tortoise, are best friends and find alternative ways of showing each other that they care.
Next, 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 is 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, part whole models to support us in adding a 1-digit number to a 2-digit number, 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.
What a term! Here’s to Autumn part 2!
Autumn 2
This term has been another action packed term in Year 2! We started out by learning 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 in our character descriptions and we wrote detailed descriptions Long John Silver. We then created our very own pirate and wrote a description using all of the previously taught skills. Also, we used a character description to draw a picture of Long John Silver, refining our art skills at the same time.
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. We have also began to explore money including recognising and counting coins and notes.
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. Not only did we have a busy time during our topic, we also managed to fit in a fabulous nativity, we look forward to viewing this in the New Year.
What an incredible term it has been!
Spring 1
This half term has been a little different, as many of us have returned to home learning and completed tasks via our online learning platform; Seesaw. We are extremely proud of all of our children for displaying such determination and resilience during these difficult times.
We began the term by studying the whole school text of Beauty and the Beast. We recapped our learning about character descriptions and created a ‘missing poster’ for Belle. This lead onto us investigating the settings within the story and writing our very own setting description that included many new grammatical features. We continued this theme within our topic tasks and used sketching to create the famous rose from the story.
Next, we explored our environmental education topic ‘BEEing Rescuers’. We have used the Tin Forest as our text in English to explore the feelings of those living in waste sites. This helped us to use descriptive language in a narrative that gave speech to the character as he was without in this text. The children explored 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.
In topic, we have been exploring the plight of the bees in our world and what this will mean. We have looked historically at mass extinction and found fossils in our Eco garden. This led us to explore the fate of dinosaurs and how this could happen for bees if we are not trailblazers for future climate change.
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.
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 animals including humans. We have looked into the basic needs of animals and humans and the importance of keeping fit and healthy by exercising and eating lots of healthy food. We have also learnt about the life cycles of different animal groups including mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds and the life cycles of humans.
Spring 2
During Spring 2 Year 2 made an unusual discovery, 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.
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. We researched castles and created a non-fiction booklet that included photographs.
In our Maths lessons, we have been learning about measure, statistics and shape.
During topic time, we have discovered the locations of castles to uncover where the dragon may have lived; we looked carefully at the human and physical features of each area to determine which may be the possible location.
We have discovered the reason there are castles in the U.K and what their purpose was for in history and looked specifically at the Tudor family to see how battles were won using the land and defending the castle.
We designed a dragon eye and then used clay to sculpt following our design.
Summer 1
This half term has been fun filled and action packed. We have explored all that is ‘Weird, Wacky and Wonderful’ through investigating the growth of plants in weird and wonderful places, we learnt all about Kandinsky, a Russian abstract artist, and emulated his work with our own take. We looked for similarities and differences between his earlier and later work. In Design and Technology, we designed, made and evaluated a hand puppet to use to stage our very own puppet shows.
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 if we were 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.
We look forward to the next half term where we will be learning all about our wonderful world in our next topic, An Island Home.
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. We have explored indigenous art from Oceania, music from Africa, traditional dance from Europe, celebrated Independence Day whilst visiting North America, climbed the canopies of the rainforests in South America, learnt about the scientific work happening in the Antarctic and celebrated a traditional Thai festival whilst visiting Asia.
The learning that our children participated in and engaged with was above and beyond, showing true Forsbrook spirit.
In English, we have explored a variety of legends and became authors to write our very own legend. We have learnt all about telling the time and investigated mass in our maths lessons.
We had a fantastic day on our trip to ‘Conkers’ educational center where we took part in lots of outdoor learning, it was great fun. We hope you all have an amazing summer 🙂
