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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!

13 January 2012

This week’s spellings are verbs (‘doing words’) ending in ‘ing’. Your child will be tested on Friday 20 January 2012.

• joining
• fishing
• floating
• reading
• teaching
• writing
• sleeping
• looking
• thinking
• beating

13 January 2012

Spellings this week are again based on the Wow Words we are trying to use in our writing. Children will also be tested on their understanding of the words.  They will be tested on Friday 20 January 2012.

• apparition
• sodden
• languish
• confined
• grimace
• congenial
• silhouette
• formidable
• endeavour
• longevity

13 January 2012

This week’s spellings are all verbs in the past tense that end in ‘ed’. I’ve noticed that we are making some common mistakes when spelling these words. For example, ‘askt’ instead of ‘asked’. Another common mistake is missing out the e before the d. For example, talkd instead of talked.

Children will be tested on eight out of the ten spellings on Friday 20 January.

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.

13 January 2012

For all children in Year 1 to Year 6, the homework this week is Talk Time:

Which two charities should we support at school and why?

It’s time for children to think about our school charities.  Currently, we support the NSPCC and the WWF.  A previous School Council selected these because they wanted to help animals and people, and wanted to help nationally and internationally.  We’ve helped these charities for two years now, so it’s time for a change.  We need you to have a discussion at home about which charities would be best for us to support.  Each class will then discuss this and then the councillors will bring the views and ideas together to decide on the charities. 

You might want to discuss whether we support a local charity like St Gemma’s, or a children’s charity like Unicef, or a charity that have helped our learning, like the Dogs’ Trust, or even whether we should support charities in school at all.

06 January 2012

Spellings this week are all wow words we are using in class in our writing.

They will be tested on Friday 13 January.

All groups have the same spellings this week.

• gesticulate
• pilfer
• melancholy
• anxiety
• mundane
• pensive
• chivalrous
• dilapidated
• vigorous
• mediocre
• heinous