year 2

Happy New Year! We hope everybody had a lovely holiday and a massive thank you for all the lovely gifts you gave us.

Here is our third Home Guide for the year. Again, this guide contains information about topics that we shall be covering this Spring half term and suggestions for things you can do at home with your child to extend their learning.

All of the weekly spellings are given here in advance. We shall be testing pupils on spellings every week, and the dates for these tests are provided here.

 Spellings tests will begin on Friday 13th January 2012.

Please keep reading with your child every day and please make sure that your child brings back their Guided Reading books on their allotted day, with the homework completed. New Guided Reading will not be given out until the old book is returned.

Literacy:
Spellings for the term - please go through these with your child. Children will have a spelling test each week. We also include details about the topics we are covering in class.

Maths:
A summary of the topics we are covering this term, and a list of the multiplication tables we will be expecting the children to know by the end of the year.

Plus: Ideas for activities to reinforce learning with your child in other subjects across the curriculum.

Literacy Topics:

This term there will be a few changes to some of the units we will be looking at. Please keep checking for regular updates.

Non-fiction: The Great Fire of London/ History.

The topic this term is ‘The Great Fire of London’ (1666). The children will use historical enquiry skills to investigate the topic. They will learn in detail about the events before, during and after the Great Fire. Then, they will write about it in a week’s worth of cross-curricular Literacy lessons.

Poetry: Mini Beasts

The children will be writing poems about mini-beasts, with an emphasis on descriptive language using similes, imagery, alliteration, etc. It would be great if you could find time to read as many poems with your child as you can.

Science

This term will be continuing our work on Forces. We will develop the children's knowledge of different forces: push, pull and twist. We will be having lots of fun forces experiments using toy cars and ramps, developing the children’s understanding of Fair Testing, as well introducing the idea of analysing test results.

Suggested activities:
- Discuss the many ways we use forces in real life (i.e., throwing a ball in the air uses pushing.)
- Discuss the different ways of talking about forces (i.e., stretching is really a kind of pulling force.)
- The children are always fascinated by the concept of gravity, the ultimate pulling force. You can show how gravity works in real life: a thrown ball comes back to earth, etc.

PSHE:

We will follow the scheme of work dictated by the Social and Emotional Learning aspects of children’s learning (SEAL). The topic this term is ‘Going for Goals.’

Other subjects:

Art: The children will be making a collage inspired by the idea of ‘Mother Nature, the Designer.’

R.E: This term our RE focus is Stories. We will be looking at a range of stories, some traditional tales, children’s fiction and religious stories from different faiths.

ICT: where possible, we will use the ICT suite working in pairs to learn the basics of word-processing, internet use and painting programs. ICT is also regularly incorporated throughout the curriculum through interactive whiteboard use and digital photograph.

Music/PE/Dance

A weekly Music lesson with Mr Morris, a weekly PE lesson with Morris, and a weekly Dance lesson with Ms Robbins.

Children must have trainers and sensible trousers/ joggers for PE and a dance kit is optional.

Timetable for this term:

NW/ RH: Dance (Tuesday), PE (Friday)

MP: Dance (Wednesday), PE (Thursday)