Living and Learning: 8Rs for learning
For the start of this half-term, our Living and Learning focus is the ‘8 Rs for learning’. This is about promoting good learning behaviour for your child.
In class, the children will focus on different ‘Rs’. We use an animal to symbolise each ‘R’, which might help your child remember all eight – can your child remember which animal matches the correct ‘R’?
You can support your child at home – we’ve listed a few ideas to help you below. Ask us if you’ve any questions or comments.
Download top tips for promoting the 8Rs for good learning behaviour.
Risk taking
Talk about the difference between a safe and unsafe risk. At school, we want your child to take a safe risk by having a go at answering, even if unsure; trying something new and attempting harder learning.
Responsibility
Provide time and space at home so your child is able to organise themselves: their PE kit, reading book, homework, spellings and tables… Don’t organise everything for them!
Make a link between rights and responsibilities: your child has the right to a great education, but needs to be responsible for their own learning.
Responding
This could be responding to their teacher in class or responding to feedback in their learning.
Ready
Make sure your child is at school on time for a prompt start.
Make sure your child has had plenty of sleep so they are alert and ready to learn at all times.
Encourage your child to ask lots of questions – that shows they want to learn!
Resourceful
Encourage your child to be organised so they can play with a range of different toys.
Encourage your child to try new ways to solve a tricky problem.
Resilience
Encourage your child to keep going! Set a tricky challenge or puzzle for your child to do.
Encourage your child to think of different ways of doing things.
Don’t let your child win when they play a game – they need to experience losing, too!
Celebrate mistakes as opportunities to learn – be happy that your child found some learning hard and encourage them to ‘bounce back’ and learn from the experience.
Relate this ‘R’ to Humpty Dumpty and our current whole school topic, After the Fall.
Remember
Make sure they have time to learn spellings, number bonds and times tables – a little practice daily is best.
Play memory games:
Kim’s game: show them objects for 30 seconds… can they remember all the objects?
Can they build up the sequence, ‘I went to the shop and I bought an apple’… ‘I went to the shop and I bought an apple and a bike.’… ‘I went to the shop and I bought an apple, a bike and a cucumber.’ etc … Take turns!
Reflect
Talk with your child about what they’ve learnt, asking questions about how they learnt, why they learnt it, when they’ll use their learning, how they would teach this to someone else, what learning might link with what they’ve learnt today…
This week, children will have the opportunity to not only reflect on their learning in general but also reflect on how the 8Rs supports their learning.
Of course, these characteristics are referred to throughout the year across all subjects to promote good learning behaviour.
Tennis
Take a look at a few photos from our latest Tennis session.
As you can see, the children are trying really hard to watch the ball onto their racket. The children have been working independently to improve their hand eye coordination. They are trying to position their body and read where the ball is bouncing before striking it again into the air. Soon, the children will move onto playing in pairs to test out these skills with a partner.
Welcome back!
Hello everyone!
What a first two weeks it has been! All the children have settled back into school life brilliantly. I have been really impressed to see how the children have adapted to the ‘new normal’ in school.
Here’s a little bit about our plans for the next few weeks…
In maths, we’re beginning with place value and looking at numbers to 100. We are recapping some of the learning from Year One, to make sure that everyone is confident before moving on to the trickier Year Two skills.
Starting at any given number, support your child at home by counting forwards and backwards within 100. Also, give them a number and ask them to tell you how many tens and ones the number is made up of.
In writing, we’re looking at sentence structure. Again, we’re recapping on Year One learning to begin with. This will help the children become confident writers, for when we begin to write our own short narratives, recounts and diary extracts.
Support your child at home by asking them to write sentences using varied punctuation, including full stops, question marks and exclamation marks.
In reading, we’re using our whole school novel ‘After the Fall’. In Year Two, we practice reading in a variety of ways. We have daily phonics and fluency (ask your child what this is) sessions, one-to-one reading and lessons that teach skills such as RIC (retrieval, interpret and choice).
Please read at home as much as you can. Look out in the coming days for your child’s home reading book. Reading this as much as possible at home, will help build up your child’s fluency.
In topic, we will use the book ‘After the Fall’ as a stimulus which will inspire lots of artwork. The children will take part in sketching, painting and collaging.
We will miss you, Year 2
Hello Year 2 and your families
What a year and what a class! We are so disappointed that we’ve not been able to finish this year back together. You have been such a great class and we will miss every single one of you.
You have proved to us, while you have been at home, what resilient and responsible learners you are so a big well done to you and your families for coping at home for so long. We have been so proud to see your efforts with your learning at home.
We’ve so many happy memories from teaching you all this year even though it was cut short. Why not have a look back at our class news page to reflect on and remember all the wonderful learning and experiences we have had.
We would like to share a couple of farewell messages to you all.
Finally, all the Year 2 staff would like to thank the children and their families for the very generous gifts we have received. They are very much appreciated.
We hope you all have a happy and healthy summer and we look forward to seeing you all back in school in September.
Farewell
It’s the end of the school year! All the staff in Year 2 would like to say WELL DONE and THANK YOU for being such a great, hardworking class.
YOU ARE ALL AMAZING!
Here’s a poem I’ve written for you. I hope you enjoy it!
OUR CLASS
Amelia, every day you make me smile,
And Tommy tells a joke, every once in a while.
Betsy a gymnast through and through,
And Javier, your confidence just grew and grew.
Penelope, your artistic eye just blew me away,
And Inaaya, the school rules you always obey.
Ehtasham your manners are great,
And Omar, remember those Skittles you ate!
Evie’s a great friend to one and all,
And Zhuokai’s very talented when playing football.
Ralph your efforts in school are simply superb,
And Moosa, is ‘jumping’ a verb?
Saif, such a character, who will be missed,
And Hafsa, when hula hooping, can really twist.
Leon is patient, kind and caring,
And Jiya is too, especially when sharing.
Theo, your head’s overflowing with fiction and facts,
And Kian, is talented with add and subtract.
Edith, a pleasure to work with and teach,
And Sunny, is now confident with his speech.
Cate, you bring sunshine into our class,
And, Danny, when given a challenge, will never pass.
Evan, your outstanding efforts should be praised,
And Ewan, with your worldly knowledge, you always amaze.
Hardev, your reading has got better and better,
And Jaiden, a developing, spelling checker.
Parnita, a hidden gem, her hand goes up more,
And Olivia, in many ways you’ve really matured.
Rufus, we’ve really got to know you,
And Sienna, your spelling scores were impressive, too!
Well, Year 2, the time is now here,
To say farewell, and a great BIG cheer.
Each one of you has progressed in many ways,
And, as you know, we love to praise.
Year 3 is waiting around the bend,
Good luck to you all we’d like to send!
HAVE A GREAT SUMMER!
Hello soon to be Year 3’s!
Hello Year 2’s, it’s Mr Wain here!
As you probably already know, I’m going to be your teacher in September when you come up to Year 3!
I’m really, really excited to get to you know all and I’ve heard really good things about you already!
I’ve made a short video for you which tells you a little bit about me, who will be in our class next year, where our classroom is and some of the things to expect!
Click here to watch!
Latest update
As we come towards the end of the school year, we are so impressed to still receive messages with great learning and other experiences you are having while being at home.
This week, we’ve heard a great story from one of our class mates who, during lockdown, has been selling old toys and books on a stall to raise money for the NHS, their football club and Hope Pastures Donkey Sanctuary. They raised an amazing total of £135! They even had the opportunity to meet some of the donkeys as a thank you for supporting the charity. Fantastic effort!
We’ve also been hearing about visiting the sporting hero’s scarecrow hunt in Boston Spa, lots more yummy fruit kebabs, making home made lemonade, virtual sports day (including the gymnastics challenge), creating some Warli Art (a very famous form of art in India), achieving best young football player at their football team awards and of course, some fantastic home learning.
Also, well done to Rufus, Evan, Kian and Tommy who have achieved their next level on Lexia. Great work!
Virtual sports day results and skipping challenges
Well done to all children who took part, at home and at school, in the virtual sports day yesterday.
The results are in and can be accessed here.
Here’s our overall school results for each challenge (out of 217 schools).
Netball challenge 56th
Keepie uppie challenge 27th
Rugby challenge 93rd
Speed bounce challenge 46th
Skipping challenges
If you are interested in trying another physical activity challenge, Jodi from Skipping School – a regular visitor to school, is running a daily skipping skill challenge this week. Sadly, Year 2 and Year 4 have missed out on their skipping festivals this year so these videos will help the children to recap the skills they have learnt at school.
What’s been going on at home this week?
Here’s a quick catch up of some the super activities happening at home. This week we’ve had caterpillars, plants (and worm juice), painting, four leaf clovers, conjunctions, eggsellent experiments, reading thermometers, temperature adjectives, super heroes, transition to Year 3 activities and two HUGE fruit kebabs!
It’s been great to see all the photos that have been sent this week – thank you.
This week’s update
Thank you for continuing to send us your home learning or other activities. We always enjoy receiving your messages.
Here’s an update from this week’s learning with some real life science.
Enjoying the school video – have you seen it yet?
Wow – snail eggs!
Observing caterpillars while they grow and turn into chrysalis. Finally, the butterflies appear.
Imaginative artwork
Potatoes harvested after scraps were planted at the start of lockdown.
More capacity maths, tessellations and Andy Goldsworthy art…
More great learning…
