Year 2 Blog Friday 17th November 2023

Date: 14th Nov 2023 @ 11:12am

Year 2 have had a great week, the highlight was probably today's pyjama day, everyone looked fabulous. Thank you so much for sending your charity money in. On Tuesday, the children got very active with Freddie Fit. They were so good at joining in with all the activities and the music was great to sing along to, the energy in the room was amazing! 

In English, we have done a lot of writing. The children have retold stories, written character descriptions and instructions. Everyone is making a big effort to always make their writing look neat on the page, with finger spaces, lead-ins and letters on the line. More children are remembering to use capital letters and full stops and some children are even using sentence openers with commas and interesting joining words. Year 2 are getting very good at reading aloud in class or groups too. Please keep reading lots at home, it makes such a big difference.

Reading

In Year 2, children should read for at least 15 minutes every night and discuss the book with an adult. This will help with understanding the text and learning new words.

You could write down these new words in a word book and find out what they mean using a dictionary (practise alphabetical order). It is amazing to see the list grow, something to be very proud of, especially when children realise how many more words they can use and understand!

Please sign and leave a small comment when you have read with your child and make it clear that you have finished a book, then we know we can change it.

Reading books are changed every Monday. However, if you need to change a book another time, we will change it as needed.

Reading resources:

Oxford Owl – This resource has an exciting range of carefully levelled eBooks to help children learn to read and really enjoy it.

Go to https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/ and login. Explore the site and enjoy reading books from the Oxford Owl eBook library or listen to audio books.

Username: sto2

Password: 1234

Resources for questioning your child while they are reading - https://www.literacyshedblog.com/uploads/1/2/5/7/12572836/ks1_reading_vipers.pdf

In addition to this, reading a good bed time story to your child is so worthwhile and really helps towards a lifelong love of reading.

Spelling

Please practise these spellings for your quiz on Wednesday. A sheet will go home every Wednesday with the spelling list on. This is for home practise only and can be kept with you.

It is useful to write the words down on the spelling sheet, but also to call the words out and spell them out loud using the letter sounds or names. Other ideas include breaking the words up and writing them down in different colours (improve). You could look for words within words (hour) or think of your own ways to remember the word for example, spell it aloud using a tune or song.

You will have a Sumdog challenge on these words to complete by next Wednesday.

This week’s spellings are (15.11.23 – 22.11.23):

path                       hour

bath                        sure 

move                      sugar

prove                      eye

improve                   who

In Maths, we are learning a lot of new vocabulary about multiplication. The children have been doubling, doing repeated addition and sequencing, looking at arrays and they have seen how this relates to times tables and multiplying.

Maths

At home, count forwards and backwards in 5s to 60. Start at different numbers each time. For example, start counting forwards from 15 or backwards from 45. Look at how this relates to the 5x table.

Practise 2-, 5-, 10- and 3-times tables on a game called Hit the Button. Follow this link: https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button

You will have an array/repeated addition challenge on Sumdog to complete by next Friday.

Sumdog

Log in at www.sumdog.com

In RE, we have started our new topic, Preparations. The children talked and wrote about the different ways they prepared for Christmas at home, you do some lovely things during the Chrstmas season! We then thought about how Christians prepare for the coming of Jesus during Advent by lighting Advent Candles, opening Advent Calendars and some people make Christingles or go to Church more.

In PSHE, it was anti-bullying week. The children discussed bullying and what it means and learnt to make a noise if bullying happens!

In this week’s French lesson, we learned how to say some colours in French. Rouge = red, bleu = blue, jaune = yellow, orange = orange, vert = green, rose = pink, violet = purple, marron = brown, blanc = white, gris = grey, and noir = black. We repeated these words to help remember them and matched the correct word to the colours on the board. We then pointed to different things in the classroom when we heard the French colour being said and then played a few rounds of Splat, where we had to point to the right colour on the board. We also listened to the Mr French ‘Les Couleurs’ song to help us.

During Music, we started to learn the next two songs for our Nativity and played the rhythms on the tambourines and tambours. We practised the three songs introduced last lesson. We used the words rhythm and tempo to describe the music.

In Art, the children drew some very small objects in their sketch books. They looked very closely at the size, shape and details, which was quite tricky, but they produced some excellent sketches and really enjoyed the process. In D.T, we were exploring structures of houses and used straws and blu-tac to build our own 3-D structure.

We would really appreciate a few more boxes if you have any spare!

Forest School

In our first session Storm Debbie was about so we stayed in the lodge. We practiced fastening sticks together by a technique called lashing. Some of us made the initial letter of our name. We also made forest eyes and other objects. We discovered that we had to keep the wool tight to securely fasten the sticks together. Super perseverance was shown.

We went into the nature area for our other session. We played a few games of "Hide the Hedgehog", then we chose our own learning. There was very busy learning including tree wrapping, tree climbing, cooking, restaurants, den building and games. 

Next week (23.11.23) we will be visiting the library. 

The children may bring a favourite book in from home to read during quiet reading time next week.

Have a great weekend.

Year 2 Team.