We have been very busy in class so far this term!

In maths, Year 1 children have been learning about Place Value and the value of every number up to 10, so they can visualise quantities in their mind's eye.

The Year 2 children have been building on their understanding of Place Value to 100, partitioning numbers into sets of ten and ones.  They have faced the challenge of partitioning numbers into different groups of tens and multiple ones, such as 62 = 6 tens and 2 ones, but it can also be any combination of tens of ones, for example 4 tens and 22 ones, or 3 tens and 32 ones etc. That is a challenge for all of us as it involves very good addition skills!

In Phonics, Year 1 have been applying their super grasp of letter sounds, digraphs and trigraphs that they learnt in EYFS to read and spell new words and short sentences. They will now move onto our big focus  -  Phase 5, during which they will  revise and learn all the ways to make long vowel sounds in words.  We hope the children will continue to love reading and develop their fluency through reading their home readers regularly.  The digraphs they are focusing on this half term are:

 ay, ou, ie, ea, oy, ir, ue, aw, wh, ph, ew and oe. 

Please help your child spot these digraphs in the words as they read their home-reading books.  Being a "digraph-spotter" is a very important skill! 

The focus of the Spelling for Year 2 has been to identify vowels and consonants to see how words are constructed.  The children will be exploring different ways of spelling sounds in words, such as all the ways of spelling the "g" sound - "ge," "dge" etc.  This builds on all the work the children did learning to read these groups of letters in Year 1.  The spelling patterns, digraphs and trigraphs the children are working on this half term are:

soft g, ge, dge, kn, gn, wr, ey, c saying s, il, o saying u, a saying o, and  a/al saying all.

Our work in English started with lots of strange footprints suddenly appearing all over our classroom!  We had to pick them up and find out which creatures they belonged to.  Strangely, there was one set of footprints we couldn't match with an actual creature! It turned out to be the footprints of the long extinct dodo.

Our work has focused on investigating animals that are endangered.  We have read our first book, "The Journey Home," in which five creatures meet and consider what people need to do to care for their habitats, their homes.  This is a super book, and all the children have demonstrated their understanding of the message it contains by completing our writing outcome, a persuasive letter to inform people about what will happen if we don't care for animals' habitats. 

Our second book, "Dear Earth,"  is a beautifully illustrated book which tells the story of a girl called Tessa who decides to write a letter to our planet Earth, to celebrate the wonders of the natural world, and to say how she can help to look after our planetary home in her own small ways.  The children have explored how adjectives are used in the story to describe different landscapes. They have acted out being Tessa in the story, to be able to write about her imaginary adventures in the ocean, identifying verbs and changing them into the past tense.  As the writing outcome, the children will be writing their own letter to the Earth, describing where they would like to visit, what they would do there, and how they can help to care for our incredible planet by making small adjustments to their lifestyles.

In our afternoon lessons so far we have been drawing and painting our faces to create a whole school collage and explored Shape through art.  We have enjoyed two hours of P.E. each week. In Geography, we have been drawing maps of the British Isles and learning about oceans and continents. Our Science lessons have involved labelling parts of our bodies on life-sized cut-outs and exploring how our senses inform us about our lives. We have been finding out about how our brains learn and have been naming the parts of our brain while engaging in My Happy Mind activities, as part of our school focus on mental well-being in PSHE.  In R.E., we have thought about our own favourite books and about Holy books across different faiths, beginning with the Vedas in Hinduism and then exploring a range of Jewish artefacts, finding amongst them a mini Torah scroll. In addition to all this, in Music we have played high notes and low notes on xylophones and learnt a new song about a man falling in a well!

We hope that all our children in our class are happy.  That is what we come to school for.