Great Year 2 learners

The children have settled really well in their first few days in Year 2 with lots of new routines to learn!

We look forward to meeting you over the next few weeks but for now, here is some key information about Year 2.

Adults

Mrs Taylor – Monday and Tuesday

Mrs Lake – Wednesday, Thursday and Friday

Teaching assistant – Mrs Roth

Important days and dates

PE – Tuesday and Thursday

Spelling test – Friday

Homework – to be completed by the following Thursday

Class assembly – Wednesday 19th October at 2:40pm

Water bottles

These should be brought to school daily and they will be brought home every day for refreshing and cleaning.

Milk

Please contact the office if your child would like to have milk in Year 2.

Homework

Whole school homework is set every Friday (along with new spellings). This week your child will bring home a homework book and guide. This should be kept at home and it can be used for practising spellings. Homework and spellings can also be accessed from the website.

Reading

Your child will be bringing home a letter explaining about their reading.

Lexia

In Year 2, the children can access a reading/phonics online learning resource called Lexia. The children brought their login information home this week and it is great to see so many children have been accessing the resource already! Lexia certificates will be awarded every Tuesday if your child completes a level (by the end of Year 2, the children are aiming for achieving Level 9).

Numbots

We continue to use Numbots in Year 2 (using the same login as Year 1) and certificates will be awarded every Tuesday for children who earn the most coins and who complete the different stages.

For reading, Lexia and Numbots, little and often (10/15 minutes a day) is recommended.

Uniform

Please do check the uniform policy to ensure your child is wearing the correct items including for PE days. Earrings must be removed on PE days.

Finally, please do ask if there are any queries and keep checking back on class news to find out more about your child’s learning!

Goodbye Year 2!

Mrs Taylor, Mrs Lake, Mrs Burgess and Miss Gilliland would like to wish you all a happy and healthy summer holiday.

Thank you for all the kind and generous gifts we’ve received.

It has been a pleasure to teach the children and see how much they have progressed and matured over the year. We shall miss them!

 

 

Summer of sport

It’s just 7 days to go until the Commonwealth Games begin in Birmingham. Watch this introductory video to find out more.

To keep active over the summer holidays, why not try these commonwealth personal best challenges at home. My Commonwealth PB incorporates skills that are used in 7 of the sports which will be taking place at the B2022
Commonwealth Games.

Use the QR codes below to see each challenge.

We’d love to hear how you get on!

Fruit bars

It was back in the kitchen for Year 2 again yesterday. This time, we made fruit bars (a healthy snack option). After using fresh and frozen fruits in our fruit salad on Monday, this time we used dried fruits.

We used measuring, mixing, snipping and mashing skills.

Hopefully the children enjoyed the finished product as a snack after school!

Learning new food preparation skills

Today, Year 2 have been learning some food preparation skills while making a fruit salad. This learning also included a reminder about the 5-a-day message and that a fruit can be fresh, dried, tinned or frozen.

There are two main techniques we use for cutting – bridge hold and claw grip and the children learnt to use these techniques safely today.  We also used peeling, segmenting and mixing skills. Ask your child to demonstrate these techniques at home.

We talked a lot about safety and food preparation especially around using sharp knives, that are kept in a locked drawer, and getting ready to cook (washing hands, cleaning down surfaces, tying hair back).

Then, it was time for the tasting!

I enjoyed eating the melon.

I didn’t like strawberries before but now I like them.

Now I like blueberries.

I liked the juicy melon and strawberries.

I learnt how to make a fruit salad and I want to make one at home.

I liked the melon because it was nice and juicy.

I learnt how to do the bridge and claw skill.

I learnt how to cut safely.

I learnt how to do the bridge skill for cutting the grapes.

I learnt how to use the claw skill for cutting the stalk off the strawberry.

The frozen fruit made the fruit salad moist.

I liked that when the frozen fruit defrosted, it was all juicy.

I enjoyed learning how to do the bridge hold and I liked eating the fruit.

Science learning

This half term, Year 2 have enjoyed learning all about animals (including humans) in our science topic.

This week, as the science learning comes to an end, the children will be self assessing their understanding of the vocabulary as shown below.

Our visit to Yorkshire Wildlife Park allowed the children to use their knowledge learnt at school to describe the animals we saw.

We saw a wallaby which is a mammal because it has live babies but we didn’t see any fish.

We saw a lion and a lion is a mammal because it has fur. We didn’t see any amphibians.

The BBC website is great to support science learning and these videos are a good recap of our learning.

To share their knowledge, ask your child to have a go at these true or false statements about carnivores, herbivores and omnivores.

Living and learning: drug education

In Living and Learning, we have been learning all about drugs and keeping safe around drugs. For Year 2, this learning was based on things that go into our bodies and onto our skin and how to manage risk around household products and medicines.

Our definition of a drug is a substance that changes the way our body or mind works.

Firstly, we thought about the things that are good and not so good for our bodies.

We identified that some things that go into or onto our bodies can be harmful and how we might know that.

We reviewed our ideas and talked about how some things can be both helpful and harmful.

Hygiene products helps us to keep clean but might be harmful if we swallow them. The same with cleaning products. There might even be labels on these items to show they can be harmful. Have a look to see if you can spot any labels and hazard symbols on these items at home. Where are these products kept in the home?

If someone eats too many sweets or drinks too much (fizzy drink) it can damage their teeth and make them feel ill.

Our second lesson focussed on medicines – what they look like, how they are used and why people use them. Safety around medicines was also a key part of this learning.

As always in our Living and Learning sessions, we talked about how to seek help about this and who we would ask.

Finally, this week Dave from d:side came to visit to support this learning about drugs.

What three things go in our body?

Checking the size of our lungs.

Locating our heart

What are the jobs of these parts of the body?

Let’s try and remember where those parts of the body go.

Our two lungs

Our heart

Our liver

Our stomach

The children gave some great responses to share their understanding.

Pupil health questionnaire homework

This week, our whole school homework is I can share my views about health.

We’re proud to be a happy and healthy school.

Each year, we ask you to complete a short health questionnaire. Your views can help us to become even happier and healthier.

Parents/carers: please complete this survey with your child, to find out their views on some of our key health issues at school, and comment at the end.

Please submit before Friday 15 July 2022 and as an extra incentive the class that submit the most responses will earn an extra playtime next week!