Welcome to Class 2

Taught by Mr Hartley with Teaching Assistants Miss Edwards , Mrs Morris and Mrs Brooke

Important Information for Class 2

• P.E. – We will be doing PE on Mondays and Thursdays.
• Spellings – Our spellings test is every Friday.
• Show and Tell – This is every other Friday starting 7.9.18. Subsequent dates are: 21.9.18, 5.10.18, 19.10.18, 9.11.18, 23.11.18, 7.12.18.
• Thursdays–  Mrs Broadhurst teaches Class 2 geography, D&T and art on Tuesday afternoons.
• Notices – We have a school trip booked for 10.10.18 during school hours. More details to follow shortly.
• Times Tables Rock Stars – All Year 2 parents now have login details for the website https://ttrockstars.com. What a brilliant website this is! I have carefully selected the times tables suitable for your children and the corresponding division facts. Year 1 parents will receive login details for your children shortly.

Class 2 Gallery

We will be taking lots of pictures of all our exciting activities this term so please come back soon to see these!

Autumn Term

Hello and welcome back to Autumn Term in Class 2. I hope you and your children had a great summer. Please see below the letter sent out to parents on 4.9.18 to let you know what’s happening this term;

Dear Parents,

I hope you all had a lovely summer.Mrs Broadhurst will be teaching Class 2 geography, art and D&T on Tuesday afternoons. Mrs Morris Will work in Class 2 on Mondays and Tuesdays and Miss Edwards will work in Class 2 on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.

TOPIC

Our topic in history is The Great Fire of London. The children will be finding out all about this tragic event and will have the chance to write adventure stories, non-chronological reports and newspaper reports on this topic. If you have any books or information on this event it would be great to see and share with the children. All books will be looked after and returned.

READING BOOK SCHEME

The children  will choose their own books from the correct colour book box and then ‘tick off’ the books they have read from a sheet with a partner to help them.

Listening to your child read on a regular basis, for example 3 or 4 times a week really helps them to progress and your help is greatly appreciated.

It will be very helpful if you could please continue to do the following:

• Return the reading record to school each day with the books, even if they have not yet been read at home.
• When you read with your child, enter the date and title of the book in the reading record and sign your name.
• Feel free to comment on how your child has done, but please don’t feel that you must do this every time as just signing your name is fine.

 SMIRFS

Your child will be working on their SMIRF targets. You can find these in the front of their yellow reading record book.  Like last year, the aim for your child is to complete the targets to enable them to move onto the next planet. Instant recall of mental maths is really beneficial to your child’s understanding and further progress in maths.  Please encourage your child to practise these on a regular basis, just 5 minutes is perfect! We will be recapping on the SMIRF that your child is currently on, even if it has previously been signed off, but will we not re-visit previous planets that your child has already completed.

 TIMES TABLE ROCK STARS

This is a great website where the children practise their times tables (and the corresponding division facts). Each child has their own username and password to login (Year 1 children will be given their login details shortly). Hopefully all parents are aware of this site now but don’t worry if you’re not, just pop in and I’ll give you your child’s login details.

TESTS

On a weekly basis the children will do BIG maths and times table tests (mostly year 2). These are a timed tests and are a fun way to ‘speed up’ children’s arithmetic skills. They only compete against themselves to try and beat their own best score. Year 2 children will take their SATS tests in Spring 2019 and I will discuss this with parents at parents evening nearer the time.

SPELLINGS

The test will be every Friday. The children will be tested on a specific phonic sound. For example, ‘igh’ in the word high. They may have already been tested on a specific sound before but we will revisit the sounds as they provide the children with good foundations of how to spell. On other occasions your children will receive ‘common exception’ words. These are just everyday words that children use when writing.

A quick reminder of good ways to practise learning spellings together:

• Read the word together out loud 3 times.
• Look, Cover, Write. Encourage your child to say the word by sounding it out, cover the word and then write the word, saying the sounds as they write.
• You can practise maybe just 3 words at a time, rather than all at once.
• If you are testing your child please say the words out of order or within a sentence.

 PE KIT

PE for Class 2 is on a Mondays and Thursdays. For Autumn Term, PE on Thursdays will be Martial Arts and will be taught by a Martial Arts specialist, which is very exciting! We will keep the PE kits at school as usual but please make sure they are clearly labelled with your child’s name. As PE on Mondays will be outside please provide your child with a warm tracksuit or jumper to wear.

I look forward to another fun and exciting year in Class 2. If you have any questions or queries then please pop in at the end of the school day or feel free to make an appointment.

Yours sincerely

Mr Hartley

Useful websites:

• https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/
• http://www.ictgames.com/
• https://ttrockstars.com.

Below is some of the exciting things Class 2 got up to last year. 2017/18

Class 2 Gallery

The paragraphs below explain in a bit more detail about the pictures in our Gallery.

The children visited Castle Bolton in February as part of their castles topic. We had a brilliant time learning about life for people who lived in castles and our favourite part of the topic; castle defences! Dave Manning from Castle Bolton was our teacher for the day and we all had an amazing time.

In June, as part of our Animals and Human’s topic Class 1 and Class 2 visited Flamingo Land. We learned about carnivores, herbivores and omnivores and we also learned about some animals that we had never heard of before! During our visited we discussed the different needs of many animals and about the differences between those in the wild and those in captivity.

In May, Mrs Armitage very kindly brought in her many ducklings for our children to see as part of our Animals and Humans science topic. What an amazing time we had handling the young chicks, who were only a few days old! This prompted much discussion about how William and Mrs Armitage care for the chicks compared to a life being brought up in the wild. Thank you Mrs Armitage!

We always enjoy time in the wildlife area and in May we found and carefully captured various bugs. We then grouped our bugs and discussed how and why we chose our groups. All bugs were safely returned to our wildlife area!

Below you can see pictures of Class 2 enjoying making and eating chocolate scones! This super ‘task’ involved the children putting into practice their measuring skills at the end of our measuring topic in numeracy. Luckily the sun came out so we got to enjoy eating the scones in the wildlife area. Infact, the children made so many everyone in school received half a scone each! Thank you to Edith and Grace from Class 4 for giving up their lunch time to help tidy up!

Click on a photo to see the full size image.