Our Big Topic is….Animal Kingdom
Our topic this term is jam-packed with fun and exciting events which could potentially make this one of the best ever!
We had a special visitor join our class on Monday. Ask your child about Pip and the sort of habitat she lives in.
Year 4 are going to have the opportunity to visit Allerton Grange to create their own animations involving animals. Also this term, Year 4 will be identifying and hunting for animal habitats. This will involve mini-beast hunts locally, as well as looking at habitats all over the globe.
Finally, in response to children’s requests we have crammed even more art in this term! The children’s final piece will be a mud-roc sculpture of an imaginary animal.
Class assembly
The next Year 2 class assembly will be on Thursday 8 March. The previous date on the Year 2 newsletter was incorrect. We hope you can make it!
Class Assembly
Quick reminder for you:
Class Assembly on Thursday 19.01.12 at 2.40 pm.
Hopefully see you there.
Who can be a hero?
This will be one of the questions your child will be asking in our Big Topic this term.
- Is it a sporting hero?
- A historical hero?
- A comic book hero?
All of these questions will be investigated and the children will be able to decide who they think is a hero. There will be opportunities to think about local, national and worldwide heroes. Are all heroes the same?
Talk about your family heroes with your child.
How can you be a hero?
This week’s phonics
This week the new sounds are sh, ch, th, th and ng. The ‘tricky words’ are me, we and be.
When referring to the individual letters in these sounds, the children should now be encouraged to use letter names as letters do not stand for sounds when they form part of two-letter and three-letter graphemes eg the sound ‘sh’ is written with the letters s ‘ess’ and h ‘aitch’ not ‘ssss’ and ‘h’.
We also teach the children to join up the letters to form these digraphs to make it easier for them to remember.
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.
