Year 2 Kingfisher 2022 - 2023

Welcome to the Year 2 Kingfisher Class! 

We all hope you've had a restful summer and are ready to start 2022! I am super excited to work with each and every one of you this year. It has been a brilliant start to this academic year and we have some exciting topics planned!

Please keep checking our page as it will be updated with what class 2 Kingfishers have been up to, showing some of their achievements.

Some important things for parents to know:

• Our day starts at 8:30 and ends at 3pm. Children should be dropped off and collected at the end of the path leading to the Year 2 door. Please line up so it is easier to send children out at the end of the day. If you arrive late, please come in through the office.
• PE will be on a Monday. Please send your child to school in PE kit on this day. Acceptable PE Kit includes:
  • white t-shirt and navy fleeze or jumper (in winter)
  • navy blue or black shorts, joggers or leggings
  • trainers or pumps
• Children will be sent home with a book to read every day. Please encourage your children to read the story three times a week but avoid reading the same story three times in one night. Reading frequently will develop your child's fluency. 
• At break times children will be offered a piece of fruit daily. If you would like your child to have milk, please order it on www.coolmilk.com (or ask the office for assistance). 
• Please keep your eyes out for homework on Purple Mash and Learning with Parents. 
• Soon, I will be sending our class sleepy sloth home once a week. Sleepy sloth, Olly will come with a book, mug with a hot chocolate sachet, and a blanket. Please look after Olly and read to him before you go to sleep!

Autumn Term One

Maths

This unit focuses on children’s ability to read and understand numbers to 100. They will use their growing understanding of place value to help them sort, compare and order numbers.
Within this unit, children will revise their understanding of different representations of numbers. They will use these representations to show a number’s ‘tens’ and ‘ones’ and use this to help them compare and order. Children will use part-whole models and place value grids to show their partitioning of numbers and use these to support their reasoning when comparing and ordering.

Moving on from partitioning and ordering numbers, the children will begin to develop their ability to count forwards and backwards effciently in steps of 2, 3, 5, and 10.

Literacy/English

We have been reading and working on our class text for this term: Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs. We have been re-capping adjectives and noun phrases and will be looking at simple and compound sentences in the next couple of weeks. We have been learning actions to remember the class text and shared ideas to use in our writing. Soon we will all be creative writers! On top of this, we have been reminded of our non-negotiables which are capital letters, full stops and finger spaces. 

Topic

This term's topic is Dinosaur Planet. This is a fun-packed unit where we look at the life of dinosaurs, including their teeth, size, and habitat! So far, we have become dino dentists and used meter sticks and trundle wheels to measure the real life of the biggest dinosaurs in our playground. We have been comparing the dinosaurs and sorting them into herbivores and carnivores. Finally, we will look at the history and life the famous paleontologist, Mary Anning. In our science lessons, we will be exploring an experiment 'Why do we need 2 eyes?'.

Autumn Term Two 

Maths

We have started and continuing to learn our second unit this year - addition and subtraction. Children will build upon the number bonds to 10 that they will have learned in Year 1.
Children will be introduced to writing fact families of equations and to relating addition and subtraction operations. Children should learn to use the inverse operation to check calculations using the operation.

For example,

If 70 + 30 = 100 and 30 + 70 = 100

Then, 100 - 70 = 30 and 100 - 30 = 70

Once the key learning is understood, children will be introduced to the column method which they will use throughout their lifetime at school.

Literacy/English

We will be reading and working on our class text for this term: Man on the Moon. We have been re-capping adjectives and descriptive writing and will be looking at past tense verbs in the next couple of weeks. We have been learning actions to remember the class text and shared ideas to use in our writing. We are working hard to become the creative writers we're all aspiring to be! Last term, we wrote amazing narrative stories about dinosaurs. During this term, we will learn to write a recount!

Topic

This term's topic is Moon Zoom. We will begin our learning journey by exploring our solar system and the planets within it. We will also explore and research famous astronauts who have been lucky to travel to space! We will be exploring different types of materials and look at their properties. To explore and test different materials, we are going to make space rockets and test them out! Finally, we will be designing, building and testing out our very own moon buggies!

Spring Term One 

Maths

This term, we will be finishing our addition and subtraction unit and starting a new unit, money. This unit is important because it builds upon children’s
learning in year 1. There is a lot of focus within the unit on addition and subtraction of money using part-whole models and bar models, in addition to counting methods – enabling children to find the most efficient strategies, such as counting on from the coin or note of highest value to find the total. Children work with pounds, pence and notes, and towards the end of the unit they will work with pounds and pence together.

We will also make a start on multiplication and division: repeated addition, arrays and sharing.

Literacy/English

We will be reading and working on our class text for this term: Katie in London. We have been re-capping adjectives and descriptive writing and will be looking at past tense verbs in more detail during the next few weeks. We have been learning actions to remember the class text and shared ideas to use in our writing. We will also look at different types of sentences (command, statement, exclamation and questions). 

Topic

Our topic is called Bright Lights, Big City. This topic will run nicely with our English as we will be learning lots about the famous London landmarks. We will also look closely at a map of the United Kingdom and the countries and capital cities within it. As London is the main focus, we will do some research on the Great Fire of London and will end the unit baking our very own bread!

Spring Term Two

Maths

During this term, the children will learn lots of diffferent short units. We will continue with multiplication and division, focusing more on grouping and sharing. Then, the children will be introduced to a new unit which they have never learnt before, statistics. They will learn to data can be collected effectively and represented in a number of different ways: tally charts, pictograms and block diagrams.

Then we will build on previous learning on properties of 2-D and 3-D shapes. Children will learn to describe and sort shapes based on the shape's mathematical properties, using the correct terminology.

Literacy/English

By the end of this English unit, children will be able to write a wishing tale. We will closely follow our class text Meerkat Mail. Children will extend their vocabulary and use it in their writing, focusing on sentence structure, adverbs and expanded noun phrases. They will also have a go at writing a letter, looking at the structure and layout of a letter.

Topic

Our topic is called Paws, Claws and Whiskers. Children will be doing lots of science-based lessons where they will look at the life cycles of different animals and understand what all animals, including humans, need to survive. They will complete a science experiment on worms, testing their senses by observing their reactions. Towards the end of the unit, they will build a shelter for an animal.

Children will also build on their Geography knowledge, locating hot and cold places and using a globe to locate countries in the northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere and countries close to the equator. Children will also do some map reading, and understand how to use a map key.

Literacy/English

Summer Term One

Maths

Children will be introduced to fractions for the first time during the summer term. It will build on children's knowledge of equal parts, which they have been learning in the multiplication and division unit.This unit also exposes children to equal parts in a range of contexts, including shape, numbers, measurements and money. They will be introduced specific key vocabulary, such as numerator and denominator. 

Children will also build on previous knowledge on time, where children will be able to tell and write the time to five minutes, incuding quarter past and to the hour.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let me or Mrs Sunderland know at the beginning or end of the school day and we will be happy to help!

Thank you for your support,

Miss Garcia and Mrs Sunderland