Welcome to our year 2 class page!
Elm Class children are taught by
Mrs Cousins
with Mr Kyriacou
and Mrs Goodger.
This page will become a vital 'pit stop' for you to visit and find out what your child is learning at school. You'll find lots of important information about your child's school experiences and photographs of our classroom learning.
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Let's start with some key information about our school week...
Children should arrive at the class gate at 8.50am and will need to sanitise their hands on entering the classroom.
Elm Class children will have PE lessons on both Tuesday and Friday each week. Children are required to arrive at school wearing their school PE kits.
Elm Class children are to be collected from the class gate at 3.20pm.
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!
Where would you rather live.....
Greenland or Kenya?
Did your grandparents play on an X Box?
Our main topic focus for Autumn Term 1 (September - October) was history based. We learnt about developments in technology, changes in favourite toys and read a range of traditional fairy tales.
Children interviewed a visiting 'grandparent' (via Teams) about her childhood, her favourite toys and games and what she did for entertainment to pass the time. The children were really interested in learning about Granny Patricia's childhood and surprised when she told us about Meccano, Hot Wheels cars and Tiny Tears dolls as the children had also played with these toys! We found out about some playground games and have been playing them in the playground with Mrs Goodger too!
Our first week in school focused on supporting the children's emotional well-being. We spent time talking about our experiences and feelings. Children had time to rebuild friendships, familiarise with new staff and become confident with our new class rules and expectations.
During this week we based our learning on a book written by the children's author, Oliver Jeffers. The book, HERE WE ARE, engaged children in discussions about the world we live in, it offered time for reflection and learning through a range of subjects including: art, science, geography, poetry, dialogue and literacy. This was a whole school project, developing our sense of community and belonging, with each class creating work for a school display. The children settled into school well and have shown such great resilience in a difficult, changing time.
