Year 2
Welcome to our Year 2 class page.
We can’t wait to get started and hope that you are as eager as us!
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: Tuesday afternoon and one other afternoon.
Please can you ensure that your child’s full P.E kit is in school, present and correct, each day. We are often fortunate enough to have extra P.E sessions which may be unannounced therefore is imperative that kits are present and correct.
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 impact 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 practise reading and spelling these with your child.
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 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. Learning about Florence Nightingale supported our learning in history as we discovered what changes this significant individual made to healthcare as we know it as we looked at similarities and differences of hospitals then and now. We learnt about 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. Through Charles Darwin we touched on evolution (only briefly) 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.
In English we have been on a vast journey by delving into two texts and one short film which were all linked to being a hero in some way. Supertato taught us how to use commas in a list, how to retell a story using time conjunctions and linked with PSHE when hot-seating to find out why Evil Pea was so evil? A great question was ‘what happened to you to become so evil?’ Great questioning Year 2! Using a film called ‘The Present’, we looked at our core value of positivity and how to use expanded noun phrases to describe the story in greater 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!
Throughout our maths 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 jam packed term in Year 2! We started out by meeting some pirates from Treasure Island, our text that we have studied in during Topic 'Land Ahoy'. We had a visitor in the form of Long John Silver, who hot seated for us and answered our questions on life as a pirate. We used this information towards our character descriptions and wrote detailed descriptions of the man himself. We then used a character description to draw a picture of Long John Silver, refining our art skills at the same time, to help our school identify the pirate should he ever return to Forsbrook. We have also studied play scripts, which has been helpful as we have performed our yearly Nativity. This helped us to understand what characters should be doing and saying when on stage.
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 commutivity 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 traveled 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. Not only did we have a busy time during our topic, we also managed to fit in a fabulous nativity which was performed by our wonderful Year 1 and Year 2 classes. We weer all so proud of the high standard that was achieved by the children, we couldnt have asked for a better performance.
What an incredible term it's been!
Spring 1
Spring term has had a busy start in Year 2 as we have 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 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. This led us beautifully to writing persuasive letters to our Headteacher to ask if we could plant more bee friendly flowers in our Eco garden. We await our answer with hope.
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.
Back to our topic time, where we have learnt about the structure of a beehive, linking shape to our cross curricular learning as well as scientific understanding of living things and their habitats. We created our own beehives using papier mache and learnt all about team work. This is something bees have figured out beautifully so we have taken their lead and done lots in PSHE about being a team. We have worked hard in computing to understand coding. We learnt all about algorithms, objects and timers when coding our own characters on 2code and creating code for our BEEBOTs. We learnt how to debug and applied this to other parts of our learning when thinking about mistakes we may make as bugs in our algorithms and how easy it can be to find and debug.
We cannot wait for our next topic which will explore history in depth- get ready to live in the Tudor times and on the battlefield at Bosworth.
Spring term has had a busy start in Year 2 as we have 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 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. This led us beautifully to writing persuasive letters to our Headteacher to ask if we could plant more bee friendly flowers in our eco garden. We await our answer with hope.
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.
Back to our topic time, where we have learnt about the structure of a beehive, linking shape to our cross curricular learning as well as scientific understanding of living things and their habitats. We created our own beehives using papier mache and learnt all about team work. This is something bees have figured out beautifully so we have taken their lead and done lots in PSHE about being a team. We have worked hard in computing to understand coding. We learnt all about algorithms, objects and timers when coding our own characters on 2code and creating code for our BEEBOTs. We learnt how to debug and applied this to other parts of our learning when thinking about mistakes we may make as bugs in our algorithms and how easy it can be to find and debug.
We cannot wait for our next topic which will explore history in depth- get ready to live in the Tudor times and on the battlefield at Bosworth.
Spring 2
During Spring 2 Year 2 discovered the most unusual thing happened, 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 letters to Doctor Horatio Bartholomew Smythe at the Natural History Museum to explain to him the things that we had found and even sent photographic evidence to support our claims. We wrote newspaper articles to warn the local residents of what had happened and then waited patiently for Dr Smythe to tell us what to do should the egg hatch.
In maths we have been learning about measure (practically measuring the space of our hall should we need somewhere to house a dragon), fractions (fractions of shape and amounts, important because did you know that dragons eat ¾ of any given amount) and time (we needed to know how long it would take for the egg to hatch)… Super busy as you can see.
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 even made our own catapults in D+T to test historical defences, observed the results of modifications to the catapults and recorded and evaluated the result- such super scientists! We’d like to say a big thank you to Jacob’s mummy who came into Year 2 with their pet tortoise, Sheldon. We had lots of fun learning about him and the special care and attention he needs.
Summer 1
Year 2 had an unusual term for Summer 1 where we continued our learning at home. We explored all that is ‘Weird, Wacky and Wonderful’ through investigating the growth of plants in weird and wonderful places, we learnt all about Hundertwasser, a Dutch abstract artist, and emulated his work with our own take.
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 letters as the bear to our friends in the woods and used prepositional language, incorporating our mathematical language also, to draw a treasure map with instructions on how to find his way home.
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. It’s been a strange term but we’ve had fun as you can see…
Summer 2
Summer 2 has been another unusual one in Year 2 but we are so proud of how our classes are continuing with their learning, remotely. The focus this term was 'An Island Home', where we 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. We hope you all have an amazing summer 🙂
