Welcome to the Spring Term!

This term, you will learn many facts and skills through our varied, lively and exciting Year 2 curriculum. Our main topic has a History focus.  We are building on the concepts of 'Society' and 'Continuity and Change' and our big question is 'What changes happened as a result of the great fire of London?' We are hoping that the children will enjoy learning lots of new facts about this topic, along with a visit from the Fire Brigade and exploring materials and their properties in science. 

MEET THE TEAM

The Year 2 Teachers and Teaching Assistants are:

• Miss Glover will be teaching 2AG.
• Mrs Elshaw will be teaching 2ME. 
• Miss Matthews will be teaching both classes for one morning or afternoon.
• Year 2 Teaching Assistants,  Mrs Foster, Mrs Cory, Mrs Thompson and Miss Martin will be working with the Year 2 classes across the week. 

Underpinning all of our learning and time together is our school values. They are also linked to our Class Dojo rewards. We will learn about and celebrate examples of each value daily. 

OUR VALUE FOR THIS HALF TERM IS....

ASPIRATION

Our key questions are:

What do I want to achieve?

How can I work with others to achieve my goals?

English 

This term we will continue to develop our phonics and early reading skills. Reading is a priority as Salisbury Road and so we will practise reading every day so that we become fluent, confident readers.  At the start of term, all children will continue to advance their phonic skills further through our Read Write Inc program. Our teachers will also help us to be fluent by echo and choral reading with us. Echo reading means that our teacher will read a sentence and then we copy. Choral reading means we all read together, including the teachers! We will begin to answer questions by learning about the 6 reading comprehension skills. We remember them by saying VIPERS: Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explaining, Retrieval, Sequencing. 

Our class stories for this term is 'The Night Zoo Keeper - Giraffes of the Whispering Wood' and 'George's Marvelous Medicine.' 

As Writers, we will explore and write diamante poems. We will also use what we learn about The Great Fire of London to help us write our own letters about the events from the diary  written by Samuel Pepys in 1666. Following on from this, we will use The Night Zookeeper   storis as inspiration for our own mini-adventure stories and character descriptions.   We will write a losing tale where the main character loses something precious and either has to find it to solve the problem or live with the consequences of losing it! Following on from this will be writing Kennings where the children will write clues to the subject without giving away its name!

We will continue to learn all the spelling as detailed in the Appendix below. 

Maths

As Mathematicians, we will continue to develop our mental arithmetic skills.  We will secure our understanding of place value and use a variety of apparatus and jottings to represent tens and ones within numbers. We will also broaden our understanding of multiplication and division. 

We will continue to ensure pupils have opportunities to apply this learning to a range of contexts. 

We will also continue to use Numbots and will begin to use Times Table Rockstars later in the term. This will help us to practise the 2, 5 and 10 times tables. We will also be to count in steps of 3 this year. 

For homework, the children will complete the Fluent in 5 Maths homework program. This requires your child to spend five minutes completing three arithmetic questions each day.  It is a very effective program for helping develop pupils' fluency in arithmetic. 

Science

As Scientists, we will be investigating the habitats where animals live. We will explore what their surroundings are like  and how animals adapt to their habitats. We will compare local habitats and habitats around the world. We will examine what different animals need to survive. 

Geography and History

As Historians, we will learn about the Great Fire of London. Throughout this learning we will unpick what happened on each of the days of this important event. We will also look at the causes of the fire and how hard it was for the citizens of London to extinguish at that time. We will learn about the impact the fire had the lessons that were learnt.

Homework

Homework will be given out on a Tuesday. 

Spellings

Spellings will be sent out for the term. Quizzes will take place each Friday.

Reading

Reading books will be changed on Mondays and Thursdays as a minimum. Please ensure your child brings their book to school everyday, even if you haven't read at home. We will be reading in school everyday.

The reading raffle will continue this term. When your child reads at home, make a note of it in their reading record. If they read 4 times a week, your child will be entered into the reading raffle. At the end of the Spring Term, a name will be drawn and they will win this term's raffle book.

Times Table Rockstars (TTRS) and Numbots

To help your child with their times tables and number facts, your child has access to TTRS and Numbots. This is a web-based program that will help with number fact recall and times table facts. It is so much fun! If you need help with logging on, contact your child's class teacher and they will be able to help you.

PE

PE sessions will be every Thursday. Please ensure your child has their kit in school for this day. Every child has their own peg so they can keep their kit in school for the week/term should you wish.