Welcome back to year 2!

We begin this year with a science unit this half term, focusing on animals including humans. This is going to be an exciting unit as we learn all about animals and humans growing. This includes finding out about what young and adult animals are called, life cycles of animals and what animals and humans need to live. 

Last week we were lucky enough to have a visitor into school. Miss McElvogue brought her baby and little girl into school and the children were able to ask questions to increase their understanding on how a human starts in life and then grows into a toddler. 

Thinking about lifecycles...last week we also welcomed 5 new animals to the classrooms! We have 5 caterpillars in school now that we are observing over time. 

Keep checking our year 2 page and gallery for more about our learning!

English

To start the term off, with a super animal story, we are reading the fiction book ‘The selfish crocodile’. During this unit we are retelling the story before innovating it and making it our own. We began by using our talk for writing actions to retell the story orally, before remembering the sequence of the story. The story map helped children to absorb the story, concentrating on some of our story openers and story language. Our SWAG bag words are the vocabulary words that we focus on and the current words are: chattering, astonished, groaned and nibbled. We would then expect to see these in the children’s writing. 

Our initial focus has been to include expanded noun phrases in our writing. An example would be where children would extend the noun and make their writing more interesting using an adjective before the noun.

Examples -

The large, green crocodile was swimming down the river. 

There was a loud, deafening roar.

Maths 

The start of the year sees us returning to place value. The children have really boosted their knowledge of numbers up to 100 and in particular we have been focusing on making, representing and then partitioning numbers. This we did initially into tens and ones using a part whole model, then we looked at different ways we could partition the same number. To extend our learning we have then been writing number sentences. It would help the children to continue learning to count in 2s, 5s and 10s as it really does speed up their counting.