January 2023 Welcome to the Year 2 Page. 
WELCOME children and families
Mrs Law will be your teacher for this year and Mrs Holland and Mrs Warrington will be supporting the children’s learning.
We hope that you had a good rest over the 2 week holiday and that you are ready for our new learning.
The family room doors open at 8:45 and the register will be taken at 9.00. Children should be collected by parent/carer at 3.00 pm. Please remember to inform the office if a different person is coming to collect your child.
Reading
We will change your child’s reading book in their book bag at least once a week, every Friday. They will bring home one of the guided reading books that they have been working on during the week. This must be returned by the following Friday. Where time permits, we will also try to change books at other times during the week when parents have signed their child’s reading record to show that they have listened to them practise their reading.
Children have been making good progress in their reading and we will be doing much more focused work on reading comprehension. Please ensure that your child practises their reading book for at least 10 minutes every day and try to ask them questions about their reading to check that they have good understanding of what they have read.
Your child also has online access to lots of the books that we use in school for guided reading:
Go to the Oxford Owls website where you have the class login: 2022y2 password: pink
You can choose books for the colour band that your child is working on. They can listen to the text being read and practise reading themselves.
Phonics
Most children have recapped their phonics learning and are now working on the Year 2 spelling words. It is really important that your child practises the spellings that they are given each week for homework. Their knowledge of spellings builds up over time and the spellings that they are given are based on the ones that have been taught in class during the week.
Some children are working in supported groups to recap phonics and tricky words.
If your child is struggling to read some particular phonic sounds when they practise their reading at home they can do extra phonics practise using these excellent lessons from Letters and Sounds.
Online phonics lessons. For parents there is a short video (click) that shows you how children are taught to say each of the phonic sounds.
Reception Lessons (click) if your child is reading a book that is a red, yellow, blue or green book band.
Year 1 Lessons (click). All children in Year 2 will benefit from these lessons because it will help them to improve their spelling of words that have sounds which can have various spelling patterns. This is an area of spelling that children often make mistakes with.
Learning to blend lessons (click) if your child is reading a book that is a pink, red, yellow, blue or green book band.
Writing
There will be lots of opportunities for writing, both in English lessons and for our learning challenge.
Our learning challenge for this half term is “Would you rather live in England or in a country in Africa?”
This is a geography topic about Africa and we focus on the country of Kenya. We focus our English work around the story of ‘Lila and the Secret of Rain’ and this story helps children to compare and contrast their own lives with the lives of children in another country.
Year 2 children will be supported to become more independent in developing their own ideas and to be ambitious in their use of vocabulary. During this half term there will be a focus on children using their learning from non-fiction texts to inform their own writing.
You can support your child at home by talking to them about what they have been learning about, and it is very important that they are helped to learn their weekly spellings.
Maths
The main focus for this half term is for children to gain a good understanding of multiplication and division. We focus on the key understanding that this involves equal groups. The children do need to start to learn multiplication and division facts for the 2x, 5x and 10x tables.
The Hit the Button website is a very useful free resource which can help your child to learn these number facts.
We use lots of practical resources in our lessons so that children have a really clear concept of number. Children record their learning in many ways and it may be different from the formal methods that many adults are used to from their own school days. If your child needs to use counters at home to help them with homework, they can use simple household items such as buttons, straws or pieces of dry pasta. It is useful if you talk to your child about using numbers when you are shopping, cooking or looking at the time.
Teacher-parent contact
I am always happy to speak to parents about their child’s learning or any other concerns or matters that you think I should know about. Please try to remember that the morning is the time when I really want to engage with the children and settle them into school for the day so it is better if you try to speak to me at the end of the day. Obviously if it is an urgent matter I will always make myself available to you. Urgent concerns can also be passed on to me by calling the office.
We are due to have a parents’ evening on January 11th. Please ensure that you sign up to see me so that we can talk about your child’s progress.
Mrs J Law, Ms A Holland and Mrs Warrington
Enrichment Days
Role Play