Year 2

Summer Term 2024          

Welcome to the Year 2 Page. 

WELCOME children and families

Mrs Law is your teacher for this year and Mrs Holland and Mrs Akhtar will be supporting the children’s 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 3.15 pm. Please remember to inform the office if a different person is coming to collect your child.

Phonics and Spelling

  Horton Mill has adopted a new phonics and reading scheme called Little Wandle.

All children were assessed for their phonic knowledge at the start of the school year and are being taught in groups that will support rapid progress from their starting points.

Most children are fluent at decoding phonics and are now working on the Year 2 spelling words. Some children in this group are having extra catch-up sessions to fill any gaps in their knowledge of phase 5 phonics. Some children who struggled to acquire good phonic knowledge in Reception and Year 1 are working in a separate group to catch up with phase 3 and phase 4 phonics. The rapid catch-up programmes teaches all the sounds (phonemes) at a fast pace and the lessons are very structured. Children are frequently assessed to ensure that they have retained new learning.

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.

Reading

The Little Wandle phonics scheme also provides us with a wide range of phonically decodable books that are closely matched to children's current phonic knowledge. Children read these books during guided reading lessons in school where they are supported to use their phonics to decode new words and where they are encouraged to read fluently and with good expression.

Your child also has online access to these Little Wandle books on the Collins ebooks website. Your child has been given information about how to login to this site. 

If you have lost the login details for the Little Wandle reading books, please ask and we can reissue that information.

Mrs Law adds the new book from the week onto your child's account each Friday and can access information about which books have been read and for how long. Children receive house points for good engagement with these online books.

Please ensure that your child practises their reading book at home and try to ask them questions about their reading to check that they have a good understanding of what they have read. We ask that parents please sign their child’s reading record to show that they have read the book that has been sent home.

Writing

There will be lots of opportunities for writing, both in English lessons and for our learning challenges.

Our learning challenge for this half term is “How can you be the next Master Chef?”

This is a science topic about where food comes from and healthy eating. Children have already learned about what plants need to help them grow but they will now be learning about the different plants that can be used as food and how different parts of plants can be eaten. The story that children will be working on during English lessons is called Jack and the Baked Beanstalk. This is a very different version of the story than the traditional tale.

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 understanding characters, setting and plot in preparation for them writing their own story about Jack and a beanstalk.

You can support your child at home by talking to them about what they have been learning about.

Maths

Children in Year 2 need to begin to have automatic recall of the 2x, 5x and 10x tables facts.              The Hit the Button website is a very useful free resource which can help your child to learn these number facts. They have opportunity to practise in school but they also need to spend time learning these facts at home if they are to become known facts.

The main focus for this half term is for children to gain a good understanding of the concept of division and fractions. We consider both the sharing and grouping models for division and the children learn that fractions are equal parts of a whole thing or quantity. Children will also have opportunities to carry out problem solving questions using the calculation skills that they have learned during the autumn and spring terms.

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.

Thank you for your continued support in ensuring that your children have good attendance at school. We love to see them every day and enjoy seeing them grow as learners.

Mrs J Law,  Ms A Holland and Mrs Akhtar