Our unit of work this term is Sunrise to Stardust

This unit of work will focus on exploring space, Earth and the components that make up the Universe. Pupils will have the opportunity to develop an understanding of day, night and seasons and the cycles and rotations of the moon and Earth.  Pupils will explore the Solar System's basic composition and gravity's effect on Earth. Throughout the unit, pupils will investigate shadows and how the sun’s light can create a shadow, impacting different countries across the globe. Pupils will continue to use scientific language to form opinions and share ideas, for example, using ‘I think,’ ‘I believe’, and ‘I know’. 

Year 2 children have made a fantastic start to the Spring Term and we are all looking forward to new experiences, new learning and strengthening our friendships.

We are continuing to use the Literary Curriculum for Primary Schools as our scheme for literacy lessons. 

During this term, the children will use the story 'Ocean Meets Sky' by the Fan Brothers, to improve and develop their skills in creating a setting and character descriptions, labels, diary entries, postcards, captain’s log, instructions, dialogues, and extended fantasy narrative writing. There is an additional phonics focus that concentrates on the following skills: adding the endings -ing, -ed, -er, -est and -y to words.

The next book the children will read is called 'Grandad's Camper' by Harry Woodgate. This story will help the children to use their writing skills to improve their extended descriptive sentences. They will also be creating labels, memories poems, interviews, photo album captions, and ‘Wish you were here’ postcards. The spelling rules and patterns they will look at are, suffixes -ness, -ment, -ful, -less and the /or/ sound spelt a before l and ll. 

The final book is called 'The Dragon Machine' by Helen Ward. Children will create a guide, exploring descriptive and positional language. They engage with the main character in the story’s thoughts and emotions through letter writing. Throughout the activities, children explore a number of spelling patterns and rules. They will also learn these common exception words, - behind, busy, climb, could, doors, floor, many, parents, people, wild. 

In addition to literacy lessons, children will participate in whole-class reading sessions where they will be reading 'The Street Beneath My Feet' and 'Rabbit and Bear'. Children will use the skills of retrieval to extract the facts presented in these books,  predicting what happens using the front page and giving the children the opportunity to define specific vocabulary used.

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 learned in previous years before being introduced to new vocabulary and sentence patterns.

For their individual reading books, children will be reading books from the Oxford Reading Tree scheme and a choice of 'chapter books'. These will be sent home and need to be returned on your child's set reading day.

During the Spring Term, the children will be learning about multiplication, division and fractions. They will explore these concepts through practical play sessions and teacher-led focused activities. They will find out about repeated addition, equal and unequal groups and arrays and then use these skills to solve word problems. They will learn how multiplication and division are linked and use the inverse to solve number sentences about these concepts. 

The children will explore fractions in practical activities and recognise halves and quarters. They will look at the simple joining of fractions and simple equivalent fractions.

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. 

During this term, children will be developing their knowledge of the solar system and learning about the rotation of the Earth. 

We will be discussing how day and night affect us and other animals as well as finding out about nocturnal animals and the adaptions that these animals have.

The children will be exploring the forces of gravity and friction and will be conducting experiments to deepen their understanding. We will then be using this knowledge to inform the design of moon buggies.  

During the term, children will explore dark, light, and and colour through music and art, using the planets as a stimulus.

Oldcastle Primary School are fortunate to have adopted ‘Thrive’ a therapeutic approach to help support children with their emotional and social development. Children will take part in group activities .  

Within our classroom, we will be encouraging the children to take age-appropriate responsibility whilst 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 be creating situations with different roles, to explore situations from each person's perspective.

School values over the term are community and service, cooperation and being a good citizen within society, and learning and effort.

We will explore these values through our morning thoughts as well as school assemblies. 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.

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

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

Download our School App via the Play or App stores - The School App will provide you with up to date information about activities and events at Oldcastle Primary School.  Please look out for our weekly newsletter issued via The School App and available on our website on a Friday afternoon.  The newsletter contains all forthcoming diary dates for the school.