PE
PE is on Thursdays and Fridays. Please remember to have PE kits in school on these days.
We’ve been lucky enough to have sports coaching students from Leeds Metropolitan University teach Year 2 a variety of multi skills. This half term, we’ll continue with these sessions along with creating gymnastic sequences.
Rights and Responsibilities
This half-term, the SEAL theme is Rights and Responsibilities. Well done to Linda who received last week’s certificate for her contribution to the circle time about having the right and responsibility to stay healthy. This week, we’ve been thinking about having the right to belong to different communities, and the responsibility to care for these communities.
Heroes
Our next Big Topic is Heroes. From Nelson Mandela to David Beckham, we’ll learn what makes each person a hero. The topic has strong art links to Pop Art and Lichenstein so we’ll be trying to create our own versions through printing. In ICT, we’ll use superheroes to create our own comic strip.
I’m looking forward to teaching this topic as I think the children will find it very exciting and engaging!
Materials
Our current mini-topic is Materials. We’ve been sorting objects according to their materials and learning about natural materials. We’ve learned words such as solid, liquid, gas, freezing and melting. Your child has created questions to start experiments and learnt about making predictions and conclusions.
Well done to Year 2 for some fantastic creative homework on materials this week!
Phonics
This term, most children will be learning at Phase Three of the government’s Letters and Sounds programme. They already know nineteen sounds and can blend and segment two and three letter words. The purpose of this next phase is to teach another 25 graphemes, most of them comprising two letters (e.g. ‘oa’ as in ‘boat’), so the children can represent each of about 42 phonemes by a grapheme.
Children will also continue to practise CVC (consonant – vowel – consonant) blending and segmenting and will apply their skills of blending and segmenting to reading and spelling simple two-syllable words and captions. They will learn letter names during this phase, learn to read some more tricky words and also begin to learn to spell some of these words.
Some children will continue to work at Phase 2 and will be given extra support to help them progress.
If you have any concerns about your child’s progress with reading please ask.
This week, we are learning the phonemes j, v, w, x, y, z, zz, qu and the tricky words he and she.
Welcome back!
I hope you’ve had an enjoyable break. I’m pleased to say that the children have returned to school refreshed and ready to learn! You can help your child at home this term in the following ways:
- Practising the 2, 5 and 10 times table.
- Doubling and halving numbers (you could show this by using coins or other objects).
- Encouraging your child to use ‘because’ to explain their answers about books that they have read.
- Handwriting – you can download our handwriting guide here
Parents’ Evening will be in February so I look forward to seeing you all again then.
Star Wars Anti-bullying
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWY5FSBI_Ic&feature=youtu.be
An example of one of our brilliant anti-bullying homeworks
It’s Party Time
On Thursday 15 December it will be the Christmas party for Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 after lunch. The children must come to school in their school uniform but are welcome to bring some party clothes to change into for the party.
Please ensure that the clothes are easy for the children to put on themselves and that they are in a named carrier bag. Please remember that they will be playing party games and dancing so make sure that the shoes that they bring are sensible.
Thank you.
This week’s phonemes and ‘Tricky Words’
The last phonemes in Phase 2 are f, l, b, h. This week we will be assessing the children to see who is ready for the next phase. Children should know all the sounds (phonemes) of the letters learnt so far and be able to blend (read) and segment (spell) a word like s-a-t. We call these ‘cvc’ (consonant, vowel, consonant) words.
Don’t worry if your child is not able to blend and segment yet. We will continue to practise these phonemes and skills and remember it does take some children a little longer to be able to do this.
This week, the ‘tricky words’ to learn are I, no, go. A fun way to learn these is to play ‘pairs’. Write each word out twice and take turns to turn over two words at a time trying to find a matching pair.
Don’t worry if they get some wrong! These are hard to remember – they need plenty of practice.
Another big well done to…
…everyone in Year 3.
I was so proud of the class during our recent Ofsted inspection. They weren’t bothered by our visitors at all. They showed off what fantastic learners they are and the inspectors were very impressed by their enthusiasm for learning. Special praise must go to Madison, Amie and Abigail who amazed the inspectors with their mature and articulate answers to the inspectors’ questions.