April 2021

Dear Families,

Welcome back! We hope you have all had a lovely and relaxing rest and are ready for another exciting term in Year Two! Both Mrs Mace and I have been blown away by the resilience, hard work and positivity shown by everyone – both children and adults! – and want to say a big thank you for all your support with the transition back into school. We are so excited to have everyone back together in class again and ready to learn!

With all this in mind, here is what our learning will look like in Year 2 this half term:

Our Topic We are incredibly excited to be starting our new topic of ‘Poles Apart’. In this. We will be looking at the North and South Pole, plotting them on a map, looking at the human and physical geographical features, and comparing it to our lives in Britain. We’ll be doing lots of research on this, writing our own non-chronological reports about this area and even designing our own sculptures of North and South Poles for our artistic focus. Each week, we’ll be looking at different elements, including weather, expeditions and - the class favourite – animals that live there! If you are reading any books at home about the North or South Pole or have any

interesting stories, we’d love to hear all about them!

REThis half term, our focus in RE will be ‘Eastertide’. Following on from our Holy Week celebrations and reflections last half term, we will now be looking at the miracle of Jesus rising from the dead, the 40 days He spent with His disciples and His ascension into Heaven. As always, we will be taking a creative look at our subject, supporting and encouraging all children on their own spiritual journey. We will also be spending time looking at our virtues for this half term and celebrating children in our class who best represent those virtues!

ReadingReading is always an essential part of your child’s education. In Reception & Key Stage One we are working hard on our early reading skills. In order to boost these, we are aiming for a 'Diet of Five'; this means our children will read in different ways five times a day. This could mean our daily story time, reading their work, reading in our class library, reading with a friend or joining in with Guided Reading. The opportunities for reading are endless but it is definitely something we are all working on. Thank you for all of your reading at home – we can see so much work has been put in even when we weren’t in school!

English

Our SPaG work will continue to look at using different suffixes in our work, noting how these change the meaning of the root word. This will be supported by our writing in English where we will be focusing on planning, drafting, editing and publishing all our writing. To tie in with our topic, we will be learning all about non-chronological reports and how to write to persuade. To start to get ready for Year Three, we’ll be focusing on spellings and making sure we’re all very confident on our Year Two common exception words.

MathsThis half term, we will be developing our understanding of fractions, measurement, position and direction. We are going to be building on our amazing understanding from previous terms and developing our maths mastery to build our own concrete understanding of these mathematical concepts. We will be working with resources from White Rose Maths Hubs which are available online to support any further understanding at home or for your exploration. As well, Mathletics is a wonderful resource and a great place to work on mathematical concepts at home!

ScienceThis half term we will be carrying on with our science topic of ‘Use of Everyday Materials’. Following our very successful egg drop enquiry, we will be carrying out of next enquiry: ‘What materials will make the best racecourse for a toy car?’. We will be exploring the different requirements and purposes of different materials, focusing on which materials will provide the least friction and will let the car travel the fastest. After the amazing innovative ideas we saw last

half term, we can’t wait to see all the creativity for this enquiry!

Art Art this half term will tie into our topic, where we will be building our own sculptures of the North and South Pole using lots of different materials. We’ll be working on our clay modelling, collage skills and figure making. As well, we will be using our amazing creativity to create our own Year Two entry into ‘Take One Picture’, where we will be creating a piece of art based on a classic piece of art – ‘The Finding of Moses’ by Orazio Gentileschi. This will all be on our Art Day – Thursday 22nd April – which is sure to be a lovely day!

PEP.E will remain on a Monday and Wednesday morning and taught by Premier Sports. All children in school should come in their PE kits on these days. As before, no change of clothes will be necessary.

Additional InformationPlease make sure your child has an identifiable water bottle with them in school. These will be sent home every day for cleaning. Children can still bring in a navy fleece to wear in school to keep warm – hopefully we’ll see some warmer days soon! These can stay in school all week but must be taken home on every Friday.

Thank you so much for all of your support so far this year. We are excited and ready to start a new term with all of our 30 amazing children back in school together!

Kindest thanks,Miss Nicholson and Mrs Mace