Spring Term 2018

Hello and welcome to the Year 1 and 2 page!

Below I hope you will find some useful information about life in Year 1 and 2.

Bulletin Board:

• Year 1 and 2 children will register in Ms. Challenor's classroom (the classroom opposite the library, next to Mrs Jones' room) in the mornings. They should be in the classroom by 8:55 am, as register closes at 9:00. Home time is 15:20.

• We are so lucky to have a number of adults, including volunteers, who read with our children multiple times weekly. Please ensure your child has their reading book and yellow reading record in their bag every day so that we can help support your child with their reading progress! 

• PE lessons are on Monday and Tuesday afternoons - please ensure that children have the correct kit in school. The kit is plain black shorts/leggings/jogging bottoms, a plain white t-shirt and trainers or pumps.

• During 'Active Maths', which we enjoy doing several times a week, children must wear pumps or trainers.

• Homework is usually set pages of Maths and English from the children's Homework books. Occasionally, it might be a different task, if this is more appropriate to what children have learnt in school. Homework is set on Fridays and should be handed in the following Thursday. Children also receive spelling homework, which they need to give to the staff member who teaches their group.

• We want to be a healthy school, full of happy children who know how to make good choices when it comes to nutrition. Therefore, snacks brought in from home for morning breaktime must be fresh fruit or vegetables (e.g. cucumber, tomatoes or carrots) and drinks in bottles should be water. Please save those chocolate bars for treats at home!

Topic

I am very pleased to annouce that our topic this term is...

The Great Fire of London!  

The story of the 1666 Pudding Lane Bakery fire, which went on to burn down most of the city of London within a week, is truly fascinating! It is also an event of national significance to Britain; did you know, for example, that prior to the Great Fire, there was no Fire Service? Or, that around 80,000 people, sadly, had their homes destroyed?

Through our studies in history, we will be examining what happened in the fire, what contributed to the spread of the fire, and how this changed people's lives in subsequent years. In Geography, we will also be learning about modern urban life in cities such as London, comparing it to the rural village of Mow Cop. In our D&T and Art lessons, we will be taking inspiration from our topic to create Tudor-era model houses.

English

Ms Challenor will be teaching Year 1 and 2 children their English lessons daily. 

We will be studying the diary of Samuel Pepys, from our Topic, and creating our own eye witness accounts of the Great Fire of London. We will also be studying instructions, creating recipes for baked goods to sell in Pudding Lane Bakery! Narratives will also form an important part of our writing and reading, as we will learn to create our own stories.

We will continue to focus on the foundations of written language: creating our own sentences, sequencing them to create narratives and texts from a range of other genres, learning to spell the most common English words, applying our phonics and spelling rules for KS1 and using basic puctuation with increasing confidence.

Phonics and Spelling

Phonics is a really important part of our Literacy learning in Year 1 and 2, and we will build our skills in both reading and writing. Children have already made a super start in Reception, and we will continue to follow the 'Letters and Sounds'  framework in Year 1 that the children have started to learn previously. We will also be learning the Year 1 spelling rules from the National Curriculum.

Year 2 will be consolidating prior learning in Year 1, whilst also learning new spelling rules, following the National Curriculum. This will largely focus on spelling rules for adding suffixes like -ly, -ful, -ness, -ed, -er and -ing, as well as learning groups of words with similar spellings and those which do not fit the rules - called 'Common Exception Words'.

Phonics and spelling across the school will be taught in small, differentiated groups, allowing for the children to focus on the outcomes of their individual phase and year group at a pace that is achievable to them. Regular sessions will allow the children to gain new skills which they can then apply to reading and writing across the curriculum. 

May I recommend the website 'PhonicsPlay' if you would like to practise your phonics at home? The website has lots of free games and printable resources, as well as a subscriber area too. It is useful for both Year 1 and Year 2. Click on the image below if you would like to visit the site!

Maths

Ms Challenor will be teaching Maths to Year 1, while Year 2 will be taught by Miss Mason and Ms Challenor, with lessons happening every day. Children will be developing their number skills, increasing their confidence in understanding the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) and their mathematical symbols, as well as place value and counting skills, so that children become increasingly numerate. Additionally, they will be developing their understanding of mathematical concepts through solving every day problems and using a wide range of mathematical vocabulary.

In the first instance, this will largely come from children working with a wide range of concrete apparatus (such as cubes, counters, Numicon, Base 10 equipment, buttons, shells, bundles of wooden sticks in tens, etc).

As they gain in skill and knowledge, children increasingly learn to use pictorial represatations of mathematical concepts, including number lines, hundred-squares and the part-part-whole model. Finally, they will begin to learn other written methods as they progress through KS1.As well as number skills, we will also be developing our knowledge of geometry and ways of measuring length, time, capacity, volume

and mass. 

We are currently learning our 2, 5 and 10 times tables. We need to know the whole operations off by heart. We also need to know how to use these to solve inverse division calculations.

So, if I know that...

...6 x 5 = 30...

...I also know that...

...30 ÷ 5 = 6! 

Also, we need to know our Bonds of 10 by rote, so we can apply them to our Maths calculations. If you know all your bonds of 10, can you work out  (derive) the bonds of 20?

So, if I know that...

...4 + 6 = 10...

...I also know that...

...4 + 16 = 20       and       14 + 6 = 20! 

Reading

We LOVE reading in Year 1 and 2. Children should keep practising every day so that they become more and more fluent at word recognition. We know it can be really tricky for young children at first, but the more they practice, the easier it gets. It is also important the children develop their comprehension skills and can understand and respond to the texts that they read.

Science

This term, we shall be learning about 'Every Day Materials and their Properties!' Our learning will focus on sorting and classifying materials by their similarities and differences, carrying out investigations to identify suitable materials for different uses, and exploring the idea of changing materials - are all changes permanent, or can some be reversed?

What do we need to remember to bring to school?

Please make sure you bring your PE kit (including pumps/trainers), reading book and reading record into school.