Year Two weekly newsletter

Another week has flown by and we have completed so much learning of our new topics and units in Year Two.

In English, we have continued to delve deeper into our river story. This week, you focused on the different settings that our character visits along the river. You explored mangroves, jungles, fields, cities, valleys, hills, the countryside, and even the ocean. You wrote about what the character could see, feel, hear, and touch in these places, which helped you to create a detailed setting description about one of them. Year Two, this really showed me what incredible writers you are! Later in the week, you decided on the settings your own character would travel through on their river journey – the ocean, the countryside, and the jungle. On Friday, you planned your opening paragraph, carefully thinking about who your character was, where they lived, and what kind of boat they would travel on. You then wrote your first paragraph for your very own circular narrative.

In phonics this week, you started in your new phonics groups. You revisited some of the sounds you may have forgotten over the summer to refresh your knowledge. You then read your first book in your new group, focusing on building your fluency, accuracy, and comprehension skills.

In maths this week, I have been amazed with how hard you have worked whilst tackling some very tricky concepts. We continued our unit on place value to 100 and began by comparing numbers to see which were the greatest. You recapped the meaning of the more than, less than, and equals symbols, and then played a game where you picked two numbers from a cup and used the correct symbol to compare them. Building on this, you then picked one number and one symbol, and had to think carefully about another number that would fit with the symbol.

For the rest of the week, we focused on using number lines. Although we found this tricky at first, you kept persevering and made great progress. You learnt how to represent numbers to 100 on a marked number line and discovered that using your number line to 10 helped you to place your 10s on a number line to 100. You then moved on to unmarked number lines, learning how to represent numbers to 100 without the markers. To finish the week, you worked on identifying which 10s would go at the start and end of a number line if you were given one number. For example, if you had the number 67, you knew that 60 would be at the start and 70 would be at the end. You worked so hard to use your knowledge of counting in 10s to master this!

In our afternoon learning we have been super busy. In RE, you focused on where the first bible had come from. You listened to the story of the dead sea scrolls and you found out that the bible was first written on a scroll. You retold this story in your books. In your courageous advocacy, you started to learn that you are going to be leaders of kindness for this term. You thought about what it means to be kind and we looked at some 'sandpaper words' and some 'cotton wool' words and thought about what these are. This then linked very nicely to our heartsmart lesson the next day where we looked at how people can judge us and call us names depending on how we are on the inside. We linked this to how sandwiches are named because of their filling. We thought about what names would be given to a heart smart person and what names would be given to someone who isn't a heart smart person. In history, we looked at the history of trains and how George Stephenson made the first steam locomotive 'The rocket' and how him and his son created the grand junction railway which connected Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester together. We then thought carefully about what the impact of the railway was on Britain and Crewe and thought about some of the positive and negative impacts. In science, you looked at the suitability of different materials and how one object can be made from different materials like a spoon or cup depending on what it is used for. You then completed an experiment and you wore four different types of gloves to see which was was more suitable for picking up small objects, protecting you from sharp objects, keeping your hand warm and stopping your hands from being wet. You absolutely loved doing this experiment! In PE, you carried on learning game skills with a focus of running this week. You thought carefully about how we can run properly by keeping our heads up, being aware of our surroundings and running on the balls of our feet. You learnt to play stuck in the mud and the colour game. In computing, you started your topic on information technology and we learnt about what a computer is and what information technology is. You thought carefully about what you can use a computer for and you came up with some amazing ideas in your partners. In music this week, we continued to look at last week's song – Hello. We used a vocal warm up. This involved us making our faces big, small, massaging our face cheeks, trying to touch our nose with our tongue. All of this helped us to warm up our muscles. We also made sure we thought about breathing properly. We sang the song in sections – introduction, verses and choruses. We focused our our pronunciation to making sure we sung the lyrics correctly.

What a fun filled week! Homework has been emailed out for this week and the children should have their sheets in their bags.

Have a super weekend Year Two!

Miss Haynes