Year 2 - Mrs Wilson (2SW)

Mrs Wilson - swilson@st-peters.wakefield.sch.uk

Welcome back to school and to year 2, I am so excited to be working with you and your child for the following year. A few things have changed and the classroom may look a little different, but the same loving, caring, friendly school (and staff!) still wait for you every day. I want to communicate with parents the best I can with the current situation, so I will update the website as often as possible to show you what exciting things we have been up. Another great way to communicate with us, is through the reading record, which will come home with your child every evening.

In year 2, we encourage the children to be organised and prepared for each school day. Year 2 is an important milestone because of how much your child will grow, mature and become more independent over the course of the year. We appreciate your continued support in every aspect of your child’s learning.

Important information

About our class

In 2SW, we are a team! We work together, with the support and guidance of the adults, to be the best we can be. We support and celebrate each other’s achievements and we are proud when we accomplish something new. We follow our St Peter’s SPIRIT in all we do and we will be recognised and celebrated when showing these school values.

Maths

Mathletics is a fantastic online resource for children to develop their mathematical understanding in a fun and accessible way. Every child has a log in for Mathletics- please encourage your child to use the programme even just for 15 minutes a day. All the activities are differentiated for your child’s needs- meaning they provide just the right level of challenge according to their level and depth of mathematical understanding. If that wasn’t exciting enough, using Mathletics frequently earns your child points, which go towards bronze, silver and gold certificates. The more children in our class who use Mathletics will hopefully earn us enough points to win the weekly Mathletics trophy in Friday’s celebration assembly! (Mrs Wilson’s competitive side comes out here!)

As a school we are taking part in the ‘Times Tables Rock!’ challenge. By the end of Year 4, all children should know up to 12x12; however, in Year 2, we focus on knowing the multiplication and division facts for the 2s, 5s, 10s and the 3’s and 4’s. We complete a time table challenge as part of our morning work- Mrs Wilson may send a sheet home if she thinks anyone needs a little more practice. Please support your child with this.

Every child also has a tt rockstars log in and can practice getting quicker on line, how cool is that!

Reading

Reading is extremely important to children of all ages, but during Year 2, you will notice significant changes in your child’s reading fluency and comprehension as they become more independent. There are numerous things we as a school do to support children’s reading and coupled with support from home, their progress accelerates momentously.

• Reading raffle- 1 ticket for every 5 times read at home, having had their reading records signed by an adult.
• I would love every child to read for at least 10 minutes every day- reading is so important
• We have an amazing reading garden in our classroom where we c
• Guided reading- all children participate in a mixture of guided or whole-class reading every day in Year 2. Children will also have the opportunity to read individually with an adult at school too.
• Phonics- we will be consolidating phase 3 - 5 sounds in the autumn term, then begin to work on Phase 6 for the rest of the year. All children will sit a phonics check within autumn 2, to ensure all sounds are consolidated from year 1.

Homework

Spellings are given out every Monday and need to be learned in preparation for the spelling test the following Monday. These spellings consolidate sounds practised during the week. Please support your child with learning these.

Physical Education

Our PE days are Tuesday and Friday. Please send your child in their PE kit on PE days and they will stay in it all day. All items should be named. Please make sure your child has an outdoor kit (with trainers), including a warm jumper and preferably something waterproof.

Kit required for P.E:

Boys - White T-shirt and black shorts and trainers for outdoor games during summer and winter months. Warm navy/black tracksuit and trainers for outdoor games during the winter months.

Girls - White T-shirt, black shorts or cycling shorts (not nylon or lycra) and trainers for outdoor games during summer and winter months. Warm navy/black tracksuit and trainers for outdoor games during the winter months.

Please note earrings must be removed for PE or covered by tape provided by the parent.

Behaviour

We follow the ‘good to be green’ behaviour management system. Every child starts the day on the green lilypad; if they make bad choices (e.g. shouting out, not listening etc.) they will move down the chart onto the yellow warning fish or red consequence fish. However, they can rectify this with good choices and move back onto the green lilypad. Exceptional behaviour is rewarded by moving up to the rainbow.

If your child arrives home on Friday without their good to be green sticker, it means that at some point in the week they received a yellow warning or red consequence fish; it may be worth a gentle discussion with your child about how they need to make things better for the following week.

We love rewarding good choices and hard work; we offer certificates for Writer, Reader, Mathematician and Star of the week.

Thank you for your ongoing support and I look forward to a brilliant year,

Mrs Wilson, Mrs Rodgers, Mrs Shepherd & Mrs Whitehead

Come on England!!! What a day supporting our country, making flags, singing songs and getting right behind our boys! Come on England… it’s coming home!

You can view the Year 2 Sports Day photos here.

Today we competed in the daily mile! It was great fun but we were very tired afterwards!!! 

We have learnt the song 'Something Inside So Strong'  and we wanted to share this with you. This has helped us believe in ourselves and given us confidence. Enjoy! Click here to view.

We tried to break a Guinness world record by joining the worlds largest choir to perform virtually for Young Voices in 'The Biggest Sing'. We have practiced the song 'Lovely Day' for several weeks and today we performed with Billy Ocean at the 02 (virtually of course!!) What a super afternoon!! 

What a day, the colour yellow just made us all smile and happy! We hope we have raised lots of money for Neuroblastoma UK, a childhood cancer charity. You can still donate via parent pay if you haven’t managed to do so already! We also did our new PE topic of football to get us ready for the euros! Ask us to show you our dribbling skills and let’s cheer on our country on Sunday! Have a great weekend in the sunshine ☀️ Mrs Wilson 

We have welcomed back our year 2’s this week with a new book in English. We are reading our first class chapter book called Hodgeheg! We have met the main character called Max, a young hedgehog trying to cross the road. So we could understand what a busy high street is like, we had a walk into our local community. This gave us a real life experience of a busy high street and we made notes of what we could see, hear, feel, smell and taste (our 5 senses). This will now be used to help us to do a descriptive piece of writing! Ask your child all about it at home. 

This week we have had a DT focus sampling different dips and dippers and then planning our own method and writing our instructions. Ask us which our favourite dip was and you may have to buy some at the supermarket! 

Today we visited our church - St Peter’s to be told the story of the paralysed man. We then did lots of fun activities to learn the key messages of the story: friendship, forgiveness and faith. We thought about our friends and what they mean to us. We looked at how we could forgive people and how it would make us feel better, by watching a tablet dissolve in water. We also could say sorry whilst watching this happen, for a mistake that we had made. Finally we thought about faith and trust. Liam had to guide Nico around the church blindfolded. He had to put his faith in his friend to be able to do that. We had an excellent morning!

Exploring micro habitats for different mini beasts!! We found out that different minibeasts prefer to live in different places: some under logs, some under rocks, some in short grass, some in flowers and some under dried leaves! We even got rained on whilst on our hunt! 

This week we have been measuring accurately in maths. We have used trundle wheels, tape measures, metre rulers and our own rulers to measure things carefully. We have chosen which tool would be the best to use for different things! 

As part of our science topic, we have been searching for micro habitats and mini beasts. We looked under rocks, in grass, under fallen leaves and in the soil. We found snails, slugs, wood lice and ants! See if your children can take you on a bug hunt this weekend! Have a lovely weekend. Mrs Wilson 

Today we have practiced a volley in tennis! This means hitting the ball without it bouncing! We loved it! We also played a game called “open the fridge!” Ask us about it at home! 

For mental health week, we did an assembly all about connecting with nature. We looked at different things we could do in our own space in nature. We decided to go outside and listen to music and then we decided to do a sketch of a natural object. We found this really peaceful and some of us even chose to carry on during our lunch time! This weekend, we have encouraged the children to spend time outside, either in the garden or on a lovely walk in nature. Some children are keen to make their own picture from collecting natural objects. 

Exploring our school habitats in Science. Identifying, classifying and grouping. 

We love learning outdoors in our science lessons! We have explored our school grounds searching for things alive, dead and never alive. We worked with a partner to complete our investigating! We found lots of things! 

We had great fun doing our Daily Mile. You can view all the photos here.

We have had great fun learning about 2D and 3D shapes and exploring these in our outdoor environment.

We have enjoyed doing some writing based on 'Lila and the secret of the rain'. We highlighted time conjunctions and feelings in one diary example and then we wrote our own in role diary. Take a look at our super work! 

We have made African masks using oil pastels! Don’t we look fantastic! Xxx 

In science we are learning about living things and their habitats, we have explored our pond to see what we could see... lots of tadpoles! 

We have also started learning rugby in one of our PE lessons which we love! I’m sure lots of the children will be keen to teach you how to pass a rugby ball! Look at our amazing techniques! 

It was so nice to welcome all the children back to school on Monday and we have had a wonderful week with lots of outdoor learning. We have worked on synonyms and finding our synonym family outside and then used a thesaurus too to improve our sentences. We have played lots of team games including dodgeball which we loved! (Especially when trying to get our teachers!) We have enjoyed chair-aerobics in the classroom and lots of mindfulness activities such as listening to music, calm me times and learning breathing techniques. 

In maths we have used counters to find a half of different numbers. Most of all we have enjoyed lots of chatty partner work and working together again as a class. I am so proud of all the children and it is great to see their smiling faces every day! 

What an end to our term! We tried to ensure we spread the Christmas spirit today with a little disco and an outside conga line! It was so nice to see all the smiling faces! Thank you for all your hard work this term year 2 - you really are all wonderful. 

Congratulations to our end of half term winners too - you’ve impressed me so much. 

See you in the new year! 

In 2SW over the last 2 weeks, we have really embraced our home learning and I am so proud of everyone for their amazing efforts. We have been learning about suffixes in our phonics whilst practicing our joined up handwriting. We have completed an advert for a toy of our choice, linking to our toys topic. We have continued working on multiplication and division in maths and practicing our times tables using tt rockstars. Even though we haven’t been at school, we have been very busy. 

What super scientists we are in 2SW. Today we have continuing our materials topic by hunting outside for different materials. We had to use our observational skills. We have then thought about what the material has made. E.g. wood is used to make a bench. 

We will now group these items under each material. 

I would just like to say thank you for a great first half term with all your wonderful children. They have worked so hard, learnt so much and I hope had some fun along the way! Please continue to encourage the use of mathletics and reading eggs at home. Here are our certificate winners this week and our reading raffle winner. Well done everyone and see you in a week. Enjoy your break. 

Mrs Wilson. 

Please visit the Video Resource Centre to view our Harvest Festival.

Another great day in 2SW! Today we have been creating expanded noun phrases by using adjectives  and nouns from Jack and the Beanstalk. We also learnt a new punctuation mark: the comma! 

We are getting very excited to see our beanstalks growing every day! At the moment, Evie and Mason’s is winning! 

We have had another super week in 2SW where all the children have worked so hard again! 

We have started studying jack and the beanstalk and today made our own puppets and acted out the story! We had so much fun! We have also planted our bean seeds to see if we can grow our own beanstalk! 

Today we have enjoyed some learning outdoors and been on a “noun” hunt! We learnt that nouns are: a person, a place or a thing. 

We have also used base 10 in our maths to help us understand how many 10’s and ones are in different numbers. For example to make the number 26, we need 2 tens and 6 ones. 

What a fantastic week in 2SW! Thank you all for all your hard work and smiling faces this week! 

Here are this weeks award winners: reader, writer, mathematician and star of the week. Well done all of you! I also wanted to share with you our wonderful display of David Hockney art work, a local artist we have studied.

We’ve had a great day returning to school in 2SW! We have started our jigsaw sequence of lessons and closed our eyes to calm our minds and ensure we were ready for learning. We have settled in excellently and had lots of fun doing some art work about David Hockney. We used paints and oil pastels.

I look forward to working with you all over the year.

Mrs Wilson x