5th September 2023

Year Two – Autumn 1 information

Dear Parents,

Welcome back– we are so happy to be back and to begin the year with our new class! We hope you have all had a lovely summer. This year I will be teaching the children daily with Mrs Grabic (Mrs A) as the Year 2 Teaching Assistant.  Year 2 is a challenging but fun year in which the children will begin to become more independent and creative 

learners. We will study a variety of interesting and fun topics this year and continue to have a broad and balanced curriculum. 

Reading

Children in Year 2 will continue to follow the Twinkl Phonics scheme. They will be taught sounds and spelling patterns daily as a whole class. 

Home reading:

• Monday: Children will bring home a Twinkl phonics book and a Twinkl paper book. The paper book will consolidate the previous weeks teaching.
• Thursday: Children will bring home a Twinkl phonics book and a ‘reading for pleasure book’. Your child can choose their reading for pleasure book from a box suited to their reading level.  
• All children will be heard read by the class teacher on a 121 basis at least twice a week.
• Children needing more reading support will be heard daily.
• Please listen to your child read daily. Comment in their reading diary using our new reading diary comments sheet.
• Please ensure books are in bags daily so we can hear children read. 
• If your child brings home a book they have already read in Year 1, please do not worry. We often do this to practise and consolidate prior learning. 

Whole Class Guided Reading:

In addition to reading in Phonics, group reading and 121 reading children will have a 1 hour a week dedicated reading lesson where they are taught reading skills. These skills are; Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explaining, Retrieval and Sequencing (VIPERS). These lessons will be built around our class text. 

Class Texts:

Take a look at our fantastic class texts that we will use in our whole class guided reading lessons and also to inspire our writing: 

Homework: 

∙ Children will receive a spellings list and a small piece of homework every Friday. Please ensure you practise the spellings on the list as they will receive a spellings test on the 

following Friday morning.

Please take a look at the curriculum for our first half term. 

Writing:

We will use our first two class texts ‘The Bog Baby’ and ’Stardust’ by Jeanne Willis to inspire our writing.

Skills:

• revise using capital letters and full stops
• revise using and / because to join sentences
• expand noun phrases by adding an adjective 
• use ‘or’ to join sentences

Composition:

• write character descriptions
• retell stories 

Spellings: 

Consolidation of level 5 and:

• er/est, 
• ‘tch’ saying ‘ch’,  
• ing/er, 
• ‘are and ear’ saying ‘air’ , unspoken ‘e’, 
• ‘ore’ saying ‘or’, 
• adding ‘un’ 

Reading:

Focusing on word level reading, retrieval , vocabulary and sequencing. 

Numeracy: Our main focus for this first half term will be place value.

• Numbers to 20
• Count objects to 100 by making 10
• Recognise tens and ones
• Use a place value chart
• Partition numbers to 100
• Write numbers to 100 in words
• Write numbers to 100 in expanded form
• 10s and 1s on the number line to 100
• Estimate numbers on a number line
• Compare objects & Compare numbers
• Order objects and numbers
• Count in 2s, 5s and 10s
• Count in 3s

• Addition and subtraction
• Bonds to 10
• Fact families – addition and subtraction bonds within 20
• Related facts
• Bonds to 100 (tens)
• Add and subtract 1s
• Add by making 10
• Add three 1-digit numbers

Science:  We will be learning about a different variety of animals including humans. We will learn about needs for survival. 

Computing:  We will be learning how to code. 

Religion:  The Old Testament: Stories and Prayers. The children will learn about the different images of God that are important to us today. 

Humanities Geography– learning about the location of different countries, continents and oceans. We will develop our ‘global awareness’ and use atlases and maps.  

DT  This half term we will focus on design , planning and building structures. We will be testing structures to build a chair for baby bear. 

We will then move onto our food technology unit and create a balanced diet. Art and DT lessons will be on Friday afternoons. 

Music:. The first unit will be exploring patterns in music and making simple patterns and rhythms. 

PE  Our PE days are Monday and Wednesday. On Monday children will have a ‘Football Skills’ with me and on Wednesday they will have multi skills with Mrs Ashworth. Please send your child to school wearing the correct school PE kit on those days (shorts or navy blue tracksuit bottoms with a white school t-shirt and blue school jumper with trainers/pumps). Our first PE session together will be tomorrow, Wednesday 6th September, 

PSHE:

Learning about:

• • how rules can keep us safe 

• physical contact 

As you can see we will be very busy but most definitely having lots of fun! Any queries or questions please do not hesitate to contact me. My email is: [email protected] or feel free to call the office to make an appointment to speak with me. 

Yours sincerely

S Connolly Class 2 Teacher and English lead.

Timetable Download

Reading at home with your child