Autumn Term 1st Half

What a great start we have had in year 2! Our learning in English has centered around fairy tales. We read ‘The Jolly Postman’ and then learnt the story of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. As part of our Talk for Writing approach to English, children learnt actions to help them remember the story. They then innovated the story, using their imaginations and the skills we had learnt to create some wonderful stories, including flying unicorns, volcanoes and golden snakes that laid golden coins. We then moved on to instruction writing, learning the instructions of ‘How to trap a giant’, with the children some producing their own amazing instructions.

In school this year we are continuing with our Power Maths scheme to support our teaching of maths. Unit 1 focuses on children’s ability to read and understand numbers to 100. They have used their growing understanding of place value to help them sort, compare and order numbers. In Unit 2 the children have built upon the number bonds to 10 that they learnt in Year 1. The children have consolidated this understanding and applied it to number bonds to 20. They have been introduced to writing fact families, and to relating addition and subtraction operations. As a result, children have learnt to use the inverse of one operation to check calculations using the other operation. We have used a variety of different visual representations to ensure a strong conceptual and procedural understanding, across all areas of maths learning.

Our Science this half term has been around materials. The children have identified and compared the uses of a variety of everyday materials, including wood, metal, plastic, glass, brick, rock, paper and cardboard. They have performed simple tests to compare how things move on different surfaces made predictions about suitable and none suitable materials, for different purposes.

In PE this half term, children have been learning pilates, using our imoves scheme and also dance using RealPE. We have loved using our imaginations, in pilates, while helping our bodies to become stronger and healthier