Welcome to Year 2 at Heathlands. This year, the teachers are: Mrs Fuller (2F) and Mrs Purshall and Mrs Ruston (2P) Ms Simmons and Mrs Harrison are our Year 2 teaching assistants who work across both classes with all of our children.
In Year 2, we cover some fun and exciting topics. These include:
- Land Ahoy
- Towers, Tunnels and Turrets
- Scented Garden
- Street Detective
During our first topic, Land Ahoy we learn all about Grace Darling, and some famous sea explorers including Captain Cook. We then move onto learning a little about pirate life and use this to inspire some writing.
In the topic of Towers, Tunnels and Turrets, we learn about the different parts of a castle, the history of castles and learn about the lives of the people who lived in castles. We also visit Tamworth Castle and explore what life was like in a castle in medieval times. We then learn about famous towers around the world and find them on a map.
The topic Scented Garden includes learning all about plants, how plants grow, what plants need to survive and a trip to Castle Bromwich Hall Gardens. We locate rain forests on a world map and explore how the climate changes as you move across the globe.
Street Detectives topic looks at we look at maps of the local area identifying geographical features on maps. We look at changes to the local area over time such as shops, houses and the history of our school, identifying ways the environment has changed.
We have daily phonics or reading sessions which help us learn new sounds and apply this to reading words. Once the children know all their sounds, we then move onto reading sessions with a focus on comprehension where we develop skills of skimming, scanning, retrieval and inference. We also have a daily story session.
In English, we learn how to write for a range of purposes including: stories, reports, recounts, instructions and poems. We focus on accurately using punctuation and begin to use a wider range of conjunctions.
In Maths, we follow the White Rose medium term plans taking our children through concrete, pictorial and abstract concepts in lessons. We first work on arithmetic skills and then apply these to reasoning and problem solving. By the end of the year, we expect every child to know their 2, 5 and 10 times tables.
