Welcome to Elm Class!
Class Teacher: Mrs Womack
Teaching Assistant: Mrs Goodger
Welcome to Year 2!
Your child has now entered an important stage of their primary school experience: this is the year of the Key Stage 1 (KS1) end of year attainment tests known as SATS which mark the end of their KS1 journey. While you do need to be mindful of the end goal for this year, it is also important to see it for the wonderful year that it is.
The final year of KS1 will see your child being encouraged to work more independently. At this age, most children will have improved their ability to coordinate movement and their language/speech will be increasingly complex and grammatically correct, so it’s an exciting year for children, parents and teachers. Throughout the year we will help you to understand what your child will be learning and suggest helpful ways in which you can support them at home. There are some useful tips if you scroll down to the bottom of our class page.
Our topics in Year 2:
Autumn term 1 Wriggle and Crawl and Scented Garden
Autumn term 2 Land Ahoy!
Spring term 1 Towers, Tunnels and Turrets
Spring term 2 Street Detectives
Summer term 1 Muck, Mess and Mixtures
Summer term 2 Beachcombers
Our PE sessions are on Mondays and Fridays and our library books will be changed every Wednesday.
Autumn Term 1- Wriggle and Crawl/ Scented Garden
Elm Class have made a great start to the year, they have got into the swing of things very quickly and have been enthusiastic about their learning. We have been in the wildlife area to find different creatures in various micro- habitats and the children have drawn maps to show exactly where they explored. Mrs Womack brought a dead bumblebee and a large dragonfly into school for the class to have a closer inspection! Year 2 pupils have been fully engaged in their experiences and have many questions that they want to investigate!
How can I help my child in Year 2?
Help them understand what they read
Hear your child read often, daily if possible, but also remember it is just as important for your child for you to model reading to them. Children learn a lot from the way we read aloud and we can encourage them to see how the author's use of punctuation changes the way we read their work. Think about pointing out statements, commands, questions or exclamations when reading with your child. You might want to use a range of voices to show how types of sentences and punctuation can be read in different ways.As reading comprehension is so important this year, checking your child's understanding of the book they are reading is an excellent way to support them. Asking questions about the plot such as: 'What might happen next? Why do you think the boy is feeling sad? What sort of mood is being created?' will help them to engage with their reading on a deeper level.
Practise spellings with them
Your child will bring home a list of spellings on Monday that we are focussing on in class for that week, it would be useful to talk through the words with them, which sounds are in them? Do they know what they mean? Can they say they them in the context of a sentence? You could display them in a space where they will look at them everyday such as on a fridge or a bedroom wall.
Real-life maths
Any opportunity to use maths in a real-life context is really useful. For example, ask them to help you pay for goods or calculate change when shopping. This will help to develop their reasoning and problem solving skills. Learning to tell the time, especially to five minutes, is another great way to support your child's learning at home; this also links neatly to their counting in 5s in the 5 times-table.
Perhaps most importantly for maths, you can help your child at home by practising their times tables (2,3,4 5 and 10) regularly. There are many different ways you can do this, but it is beneficial if your child can use and apply this knowledge — for example, not just knowing that 10 x 2 is 20, but also realising that 20 divided by 2 is 10. You could use journey time to school to give your child fun times table challenges. You can also make up word problems relating times-tables facts to real life
Encouraging independence
Finally, you can develop their independence at home by encouraging your child to get ready for school on their own, giving them some responsibilities such as feeding/taking care of pets, tidying up or organising their belongings more independently. This will help enormously as they move up through the school!
