Year 2 News  

What a busy start we have had to the term. Our students have been busy working through our lessons in phonics, punctuation and grammar, text study, our EMP (Explicit Maths Program), Cyber Safety, Respectful Relationships, and our Unit of Inquiry lessons. 

We continued to be amazed at the work our students are producing and the increased knowledge they are gaining day to day. We hope your children are sharing their learning with you at home.  

Home Reading 

Reading each night at home is one of the most important ways to support your child’s learning and build confidence as a reader. If your child brings home a book that seems less challenging, this is a valuable opportunity to practice fluency by encouraging them to read smoothly, accurately, and with expression.

If the book is more challenging, it provides a wonderful chance to read together, support unfamiliar words, and model strategies good readers use. While reading, it is important to ask your child questions about the text to check their understanding and encourage comprehension skills, such as discussing characters, predicting what might happen next, and retelling key events. 

Students will change their take-home readers each Wednesday and will also bring home a new library book to enjoy each week. 

Phonics Plus 

Each day our students engage in our Phonics Plus lesson. The lessons provide repetition and predictability, which are important aspects of explicit teaching. A typical lesson is structured as follows: 

• Activation of prior knowledge 10 minutes 

• Handwriting 10 minutes 

• Phonic and word knowledge 25 minutes 

• Dictation 5 minutes 

• Building fluency and making meaning 10 minutes 

During the lesson, the students use their individual whiteboards to practice their spelling, handwriting, and dictation. The lesson always finishes with partner reading of a decodable text containing GPCs and high-frequency words to develop accuracy, apply emerging grammar knowledge, build fluency and make meaning. 

Literacy Text Study 

The students have been enjoying our latest text study books. We are continuing to study two more of Bob Grahams books, The Concrete Garden and Jigsaw: Puzzle in the post. The students have been identifying how images complement a story, looking at the various elements an illustrator uses to enhance the story. 

Elements such as colour, line, distance, shapes and layout. The students have been come book detectives and are able to identify various elements in a picture. We have also explored using images to develop a plot timeline, inferring meaning from images and making predictions from images. 

We have been impressed by the level of engagement our Year 2 students have shown throughout our text study lessons and their increased knowledge about the various aspect of a picture story book. We are excited to move onto our next two Bob Grahma Text next week, Max and Queenie and the Bantum.  

Who We Are

A balanced lifestyle is influenced by the choices people make. 

This week we are finalising ‘Who we are’, culminating in our oral presentations on a sport. The children worked in table partners to read an age-appropriate text about their chosen sport. They then created a talk using the headings ‘Introductions’, ‘Equipment needed’, ‘What you wear’, ‘Where the sport is played’, ‘Rules of the sport’, and ‘Interesting facts.

We are sure we will be impressed with the student’s presentation skills. 

Once we have completed our oral presentations, we will be moving on to our next unit – Where we are in place and time – The past influences our present and future. 

What We Are Learning Next 

Phonics Plus 

Grapheme–phoneme correspondences (GPCs): 

‘ph’ making the /f/ sound, as in ‘phone’, ‘phonics’, ‘phoenix’ and ‘graph’ 

‘oo’ as in ‘cook’, ‘hood’ and ‘bookshop’. 

Text Study 

Max and Queenie, the Bantum by Bob Graham 

We are: 

• Understanding and identifying character traits 

• Identifying and describing characters emotions 

• Creating a character profile 

• Identifying and responding to character’s challenges. 

Punctuation and Grammar 

We are: 

• Replacing nouns and pronouns 

• Identifying and using pronouns in a sentence 

EMP – Explicit Maths Program 

We are: 

• Consolidating counting with equal groups 

• Beginning to learn how to subtract with regrouping 

• 2D Shapes – half and quarter turns 

• Ordering 3-digit numbers 

• Time using formal units of seconds, minutes and hours 

Please see some ‘Maths at home’ ideas which will help your child immensely: 

• Practise skip counting by 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s and 10s 

• Practise maths fluency, which involves asking your child to quickly and accurately solve simple addition and subtraction problems using numbers between 0 and 20. 

• Discussing what a quarter and half turn looks like, and practise turning objects by one quarter or one half 

Please keep your eye out for Compass posts guiding you to continue to support your child in their ‘Maths at home’.