Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Year 2!
It has been delightful to get to know our wonderful new class of children and learn all about them. Everyone has settled in so quickly and we seem happy in our new space!
This Week…
This week we have had a big focus on settling in, getting to know our new classroom and learning our class rules.
English - We have done lots of small writing tasks! We have written adjectives to describe ourselves, created bunting filled with facts about us, explored and described our emotions using ‘The Colour Monster' by Anna Llenas and have focused upon the most important parts of a sentence: capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. We have also done lots of letter formation practise and showed off our amazing hand writing.
Maths - We have begun our work on place value. We have used lots of different equipment (such as base ten, ten frames and beadstrings) to represent numbers and identify their tens and ones. We have done lots of counting forwards and backwards in tens and have begun sorting objects into groups of ten to help us to count them.
Science - We began our topic on animal growth. We explored and paired up a number of adult animals with their babies and discussed how some look very similar but some change a lot! We also wrote sentences to describe how a specific animal changes as it grows.
RE - We learned about how we are chosen by God. We discussed the character traits and talents that God has given to us and how these make us feel.
History - We began our Great Fire of London topic by looking where London is on a map and comparing it to Blackpool’s location. We then learned about some of the things you can do if you visited modern London and wrote about these.
Art - This half term we are looking at mark making. This week we used different marks to create our own emotion faces.
PE - Our indoor PE sessions are focused around dance this half term. We learned to move at different ‘levels’ and explored how we could use these to represent the movement of different animals. Our outdoor PE sessions are based around throwing and catching games and we have been practising underarm throwing and careful catching for close passes.
Computing - We did our first lesson of the year about e-safety. We learned what personal information is, where and where not we should share it and how it can be very difficult to remove something once it has been posted online.
We also had our first whole school mass at church on Thursday. The children focused very hard and it was lovely to have everybody back together.
PE Days
Please ignore the text sent earlier this week about PE days as there has been a change since then. Our PE days will now be Tuesday and Friday. Please come to school in PE kit on these days.
Homework
Homework will be sent home every Friday. There is no expectation that it is returned to school as I send this to allow parents to see and engage in some of the learning from school during that week. However, I do ask that you please try to do as much as possible as this really helps children’s development.
This week’s homework tasks…
English - Write a description of a person you know, a famous person or your favourite book, TV or film character. Use adjectives (describing words) to describe them and draw a picture of that person.
Maths - Draw the correct tens and ones to represent the numbers. We draw tens like chunky chips and ones like peas (not squares!).
Spelling - Please practise the 10 tricky Year 1 common exception words for a test in a week’s time.
Ongoing tasks…
I have sent home a 2s, 3s, 5s and 10s number line. Please practise counting in these amounts forwards and backwards as regularly as possible.
There is also a Year 1 and Year 2 common exception words word mat. These are the words that children need to be able to both read and write accurately by the end of Year 2. Please practise reading and spelling these words as regularly as possible.
Toileting
We have noticed that there are some children who are going to the toilet very regularly during our lesson times. We ask the children to try and go during break times but understand that this is not always possible and they may need to go during lesson. However, could we please ask that you talk to your children and explain to them the importance of only going to the toilet when they really need it. Thank you.
Award Winners
Golden Award - Sienna - For her delightful behaviour and conscientious hard work.
Writing Award - Reggie - For lovely handwriting and an excellent ‘about me’ bunting.
Maths Award - George - For working so hard and for his excellent reasoning.
Class Discipleship Award (this is an award chosen by our class for someone who has performed an act of kindness towards someone else) - Matilda - For being such a kind and supportive friend.
Welcome Letter
Alongside homework, this week we sent home a welcome letter with some information about Year 2 and how you can contact us when you need to. If for any reason you have not received this, you can find a copy of it here.
We look forward to getting to know yourselves and your children and are excited for a fun year ahead!
Have a lovely weekend,
Mr Whetnall, Mrs Bowdell and Mrs Gibbons
Rest In Peace, Queen Elizabeth
After hearing yesterday’s news we would like to express our deep sadness at the passing of our Queen, Elizabeth II. Queen Elizabeth was an inspiring example of grace, respect and leadership to us all over her incredible 70 year reign and our thoughts are with her family at this time. Rest in Peace, Queen Elizabeth.
