Welcome to the Autumn Term in Year 2. 

Class Teachers - Mrs Jury and Mrs Guy (Friday)    Learning Support Officer - Mrs Hemming and Mrs Pooley

            Class Teachers - Miss Davies      Learning Support Officers - Miss Lewis and Mrs Lewis

• September - Respect and Responsibility 

• October - Compassion and Hope 

• November -  Friendship and Forgiveness 

• December - Understanding and Patience

During the term, the children will read  'The Journey Home', by Frann Prestone-Gannon. This text explores issues of conservation and starts to explore whether we can escape the issues that endangered animals face on a day-to-day basis. Children will create fact files on endangered animals as well as write short persuasive pieces on why we need to save a particular endangered animal. Children will be able to identify how a sentence is formed by its grammatical structure as a question, a command, a statement, or an exclamation. Children will be encouraged to edit work, being aware of tense and word choice. Word classes (nouns/verbs/adjectives) will be referred to throughout.

The second book that children will read is 'Wolves' by Emily Gravett.  The activities based around this story will include character descriptions and analysis of the vocabulary. The children will also investigate what is fact and what is fiction about wolves and create a leaflet that will educate the 'townsfolk' about wolves so that they can keep safe. There is an additional phonics focus: Revision of /aw/ phoneme, e.g. claws, jaws. Learning of alternative spelling of known phonemes, e.g. /oo/ spelt ‘o’, e.g. wolves/wolf.

In addition to literacy lessons, children will participate in Whole-Class Reading sessions where they will be reading 'There’s a Rang-a-tan in my Bedroom' by James Sellik and 'Eric' by Shaun Tan. Reading these books will help the children to improve their skills of prediction, character analysis, knowledge of extinct animals and research into environmental issues.

We will also continue to develop our phonic skills through weekly sessions. The children are focusing on learning Set 2 and 3 sounds which include split diagraphs. We are developing our reading, writing and spelling skills through various practical and engaging activities. 

For their individual reading books, children will be reading books from the Oxford Reading Tree scheme. These will be sent home and need to be returned on your child's set reading day. If your child has finished reading their book before their reading day, you can encourage them to read other books available at home or practise writing sentences from their school reading book. 

Children will be participating in daily Helpwr Heddiw sessions to develop their knowledge of using Welsh incidentally around the classroom and school.  In addition to this, children will have opportunities to deepen their reading and writing skills in Welsh through focused tasks. Children will be consolidating language patterns learnt in previous years before being introduced to the vocabulary of body parts. They will be learning question and answer patterns linked to 'Sut wyt ti? (How are you?), 'Beth sy'n bod?' (What's the matter?), 'Ble rwyt ti'n byw? (Where do you live?) and 'Faint ydy dy oed di?' (How old are you?)

During the Autumn Term, the children will continue building on their skills from last year and will experience activities based on reading and writing numbers to at least 100 and the place value of these digits. We will also be focusing on adding and subtracting one and two-digit numbers. This will be followed by activities based on multiplication, involving arrays, repeated addition and equal groupings.

The children will then move on to explore polygons by creating and identifying 2D and 3D shapes, as well as sorting and classifying shapes using more than two criteria. 

Children will find totals and give change from multiples of 10p and use different combinations of money to pay for items up to £1. 

The children will also have weekly activities to extend and improve their reasoning skills, using problem-solving tasks, when they will work individually, in pairs, and in groups.

In our classroom, we will encourage the children to take age-appropriate responsibility while continuing to be clear, firm, and compassionate. 

Activities will provide opportunities for children to take different levels of responsibility for a range of tasks. We will also create situations with different roles to explore situations from each person's perspective.

We will explore the school values listed above through our morning thoughts, school assemblies and activities in class.  Children will also have the opportunity to further explore the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and what this means to them.

The children will examine the importance of a healthy diet and exercise during our Health and Wellbeing sessions and whilst learning about rationing through our unit of work, 'Exploring the Past.'

During our afternoon sessions children will be exploring the concepts of identity and change through our unit of work 'Exploring the Past'.

Children will begin by identifying the key features of Bridgend, and will explore our locality by reading and making simple maps. We will then be learning about what Bridgend was like in the past and the changes that have taken place in the town over the years. We will be focusing on the time period of 1939-1945 and will explore what life was life in wartime Bridgend. Children will develop their skills of empathy through learning about the life of evacuees and living in Bridgend during the war, as well as the contribution the people of Bridgend made to the War effort.

PE is on a Tuesday for both classes, and the children should wear the agreed PE kit to school. 

Please ensure all school uniform and water bottles/fruit boxes are clearly labelled with your child's name. 

On Fridays, children are invited to bring in recent certificates, medals and trophies that they may have won in sporting/drama/dance etc clubs. They can also bring in a favourite book or an item or picture they have made. This is for a Show and Tell activity, which we hope will improve confidence and develop their speaking and listening skills. Therefore, we ask that the children be ready to tell the class something about what they have brought in. If this proves popular, we may introduce a timetable where groups are given different Fridays to bring in their Show and Tell items. We politely ask that toys are not brought in as Show and Tell items.

We have a number of children in school with a nut allergy.  We strive to be a nut-free school so please do not send in nut products in packed lunches such as nutella.

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To contact your child's teacher please drop us an email via ask@oldcastleprimary.co.uk or call us 01656 815790.  

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