Year 2 have had a fantastic start to the school year, they’ve settled into the routines very well and have begun their Year 2 learning journey with great enthusiasm. We have really enjoyed the start of our writing topic all about pirates! We have created some super pirate faces and treasure maps. This term we are focusing on our sentence structures to include some adjectives and extending our sentences with ‘and’, ‘but’ and ‘or’. In maths we have been working on place value, making numbers using tens and ones and learning how to partition numbers in different ways, practice of this at home would be very helpful. Our enquiry this term is ‘What could my classroom be made from?’, focusing on materials and their properties. We have designed our learning spaces and will be learning some joining methods later in the term to build our designs. Thank you to those who have already brought in shoeboxes for this project, there is still time to bring in a shoebox if you haven’t done so already.
We are very proud of all the children for a great start to the school year, well done Year 2!
From Mrs Reynolds, Mrs Angell, Mrs Fahey and the rest of the Y2 team

We've had a lovely couple of weeks in Y2.
In writing we have just finished writing our own "rags to riches" story using our class text "The Story of Pirate Tom" as a model. It has been a delight to read all the stories and see how imaginative Year 2 can be!
Our focus in Maths has moved onto addition and subtraction, we are learning that sometimes in Maths if you know one fact that can help you solve other number sentences too.
Thank you for all the shoe box donations, they have been put to good use creating classroom models for the challenge to finish our enquiry "What could my classroom be made from?". Our classroom models were a great success and we all worked very hard to complete them.
We're looking forward to a busy end of term, especially our trip to Hardenhuish for the "Under the Sea" multi skills event!
Mrs Reynolds, Mrs Fahey, Mrs Angell and the rest of the Y2 team

Our focus for Talk for Writing this term is writing instructions. We've been learning the text "How to Catch a Pirate" and finding out about the features of instructional texts and then in week 3 we will be writing our own set of instructions to catch a fictional character. 

In Maths we are continuing to develop our addition and subtraction skills. For the next few weeks, we are learning methods to add and subtract 2 2-digit numbers, first not crossing a 10 (for example 34 + 23 and 45 - 21) and then once we've grasped this, we'll move on to crossing 10s (for example 34 + 28 and 45 - 26). Alongside this we are now having daily Mastering Number sessions to ensure our foundations in number sense are solid and we are fluent with number facts under 10. 

"How are schools the same?" is our current enquiry. We are being geographers at the moment, thinking about the geographical location and features of Ivy Lane before comparing our location and school with a village location in Wiltshire and then with schools around the world. We will be also learning the continents of the world and about climate. 

Across the wider curriculum we are very busy - in Computing we are developing our knowledge of algorithms and debugging. In RE we are answering the question "Why was the name saviour given to Jesus?" We are revisiting the Christmas nativity story and discussing why the birth of Jesus is celebrated by Christians.  In PSHE we are learning about differences. In our outdoor PE sessions we are developing our ball skills with Mr Hyde and during our indoor PE sessions our focus in dance.  In Phonics we are continuing to learn and practise alternative phase 5 sounds ensuring we can decode words containing these sounds and also apply our knowledge accurately when spelling. 

We're very busy preparing and rehearsing our Christmas Nativity performance - The Inn-Spectors. We're already very excited about sharing this with our families on Thursday 4^th December! Please can we ask parents/carers to support their child with learning their lines, this includes knowing when their cue to speak is and being able to project their voice to be heard, we do also ask that scripts are in school every day. 

Many Thanks,  The Year 2 Team