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Year 2

 

 

Meet the dynamic team in charge of Year 2 - there are three classes: Emerald class under care of Mrs Channon, Silver class is led by Miss Williams and Gold Class works with Miss Hollingsbee.   Other adults in Year 2 include Mrs Walton, Mrs Angol and Mrs Hambleton.  All the adults are always available and happy to speak to you at the beginning and end of the school day.

Year 2 is an exciting period in your child’s education, as we are maturing and preparing for Key Stage 2 learning. In this year, your child will take part in thrilling learning projects, designed to promote independence, creativity, team work and critical thinking.

Our learning is thematic, meaning each term we focus on one theme through our reading, writing and wider curriculum.  By learning in this way, we deepen our understanding, become critical thinkers, and develop both knowledge and skills in key areas.

Our themes in Year 2 are:

  • Who Lives Here?
  • Light It Up!
  • The Great Fire of London
  • London Today
  • Walkabout in Australia
  • Celebrate! 

All our themes give us the opportunity to acquire new knowledge, develop our skill-sets, apply our Featherby Values and develop our 6Cs: Character, Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, Critical Thinking and Citizenship.  Our learning in school is built around these areas and linked in with a class read. We love sharing what we have learnt in school, although learning also happens outside the classroom; our homework and wider reading opportunities are one way this happens.  It is important to us that we are always learners whether we are in school, at home, or out and about in the world.  Events we look forward to are our Big Outcomes where we welcome parents and visitors into school to share in our learning with us; this is one of the times you will see our 6Cs in action! 

Who Lives Here?

Science is our key focus in our first half term as we learn about habitats and animals, especially in our class read: ‘Stanley Saves the Amazon Rainforest’. We will link this to a geographical enquiry about our own locality, which will include local wildlife. In Art and D.T., we will create a class rainforest display to showcase our learning, which will include thematic reports, instruction writing and recounts. We will develop our computing skills across all subjects, using the internet to gain knowledge safely and with discretion. We will be composing our own rainforest music, with a focus on creating patterns and we will also use movement and interpretation in P.E. to link to the rainforests. R.E. this half term focuses on worship and celebrations in the Christian calendar.

 

 

Light It Up!

Science continues to be our focus for this half term where we will build upon prior learning about light. We will carry out investigations including how animals see in the dark as well as other important senses, which is a link to our learning in Year 1. We will be critically thinking about animals we see in the day compared to those who are only seen at night. We will be creating a collage in Art that focuses on diurnal and nocturnal environments. Our class read, Rama and Sita, will open up further learning opportunities, such as mapping Rama and Sita’s journey across the continent in Geography, and using computing to track this. We will be exploring how music can express our theme as well as our class read. Whilst Florence Nightingale was known as ‘The Lady of the Lamp’, our history theme will mostly be focused on outside of the theme, and we will compare the life and events in the life of Florence Nightingale and Edith Cavell. We will be using all the elements of our learning in our writing of instructions, traditional stories and poetry.

 

 

The Great Fire of London

This very exciting theme will allow us to explore many areas of learning including different materials in Science where we will discuss and investigate why certain materials were used to build houses and why they were not the most suitable! Our class read, ‘The Great Fire of London’ will help us to research facts and timelines of the events back then and to learn as much as we can about the Great Fire. We will also be putting ourselves in the position of different people at the time in role play and drama activities and using these experiences to write newspaper reports, diary entries and descriptive prose including poems and linking this to computing by emailing friends from other Trust schools to share what we are learning about. We will be using design and technology processes to design an effective vehicle that could have been used to put the fire out. Art opportunities are abundant with this theme as we experiment with colour mixing and artistic impact and effect as well as using computer programs to design Stuart house montages. Our geographical knowledge will be called upon to locate the city of London, key rivers and landmarks that were important during the Great Fire as well as the importance of directional and positional language. We will continue to build upon our understanding of the Christian faith with a focus on the importance of the Church and in music we will be learning about different instruments and the sounds they make. P.E will include understanding the importance of following the rules of the game and how we can express feeling and mood in a dance sequence.

 

 

 

London Today

We will then move from the London of our past, to London today, making links and finding out what has changed and why. Using ‘Katie’s Picture Show’, we will be going up to London, planning different routes using a range of maps as part of our geographic learning, looking at buildings that have been built since the Great Fire of London and looking at different portraits and paintings of the London skyline before experimenting with our own techniques to create portraits and landscapes of our own.  As part of our map work, we will be using our computing skills to program and vehicle to follow a planned route on our own maps. In D.T, we will be designing and creating prototypes of our own instillation for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square after researching and exploring previous and the existing artwork on display there. In our writing, we will learn about Haiku poems and writing our own and using our class read to write our own story in a familiar setting and using our own experiences of a trip to London today to write a report. London is a melting pot of different cultures and religions and as part of our learning about this, we will build on our Year 1 experiences of the Sikh religion by learning about the importance of their religious garments and objects they carry with them as well as finding out about their place of worship. London is an incredible place for music of new and old and our music lessons will give us opportunities to explore how the music scene has changed and developed in London over time- we may even get to see some buskers when we visit the city! We will be learning different songs about London. Do you know any we can learn? In P.E. we will be focusing on our coordination, ability to copy the movements of others and how to play team games tactically!

 

 

Walkabout in Australia

From London to the other side of the world with the first of our Summer Term themes! We will be using our existing knowledge of London to help us to compare it to the capital city of Australia in many different ways and using this as well as our class read of ‘Wombat Goes Walkabout’ to write information and explanation texts as well as letters. We will use our computing skills to create a document using dual coding of images and texts as part of these writing outcomes. We will build on our map reading skills to compare physical geography of the two localities and our research skills to find out how the human geography are different. We will explore Australian art and use papier mache to create an Australian object such as a boomerang in D.T. We will also incorporate our Science learning about plants to discover what similar plants grow in both localities and what differences there are and thinking about the reasons for these differences. Australian music is as diverse as here and we are looking forward to finding out about popular music there and learning how to express an educated opinion about the music we hear. In P.E. we will be playing a team sport such as tag rugby, another nod to our theme. There is a lot of opportunity for free and cued recall of learning done so far as well as dual coding in this theme- very exciting! In R.E, we will be learning all about Jewish festivals, which will give us a wonderful prelude to our final theme next half term.

 

 

 

Celebrate!

At finish off our year, our theme is appropriately entitled ‘Celebrate!’ as we know we will have lots of successes to celebrate and we will be learning all about different celebrations around the world as well as in different religions, linking our learning throughout the year. At Featherby, in the Summer Term, we celebrate all our learning at our ‘Learning Festival’ and our learning this half term is all linked to this spectacular event. We will be recapping and building upon all the Science topics we have learnt this year, with exciting investigations and taking our learning in different directions, asking our own questions. In D.T., we will be thinking about what foods and meals we have at different celebrations and designing as well as making our own celebration foods! We will then link this to our writing by writing instructions for the food we make. How we celebrate different events and days has changed over the years and we are keen to find out how our parents and grandparents used to celebrate Christmas, birthdays and other important occasions in our History learning. We will also be reading a lovely class read called ‘Alfie and the Birthday Surprise’ and using this as well as other learning and experiences to write stories from the same author and reports.