English
This half term we have read two key texts – The Barnabus Project and Samson’s Titanic Journey. Through these two texts we have begun to develop some of the year 2 writing skills such as creating noun phrases, using coordinating and subordinating conjunctions and using adjectives more effectively. We have written descriptions, stories and action scenes. Within these units, we have also used colourful semantics to construct sentences particularly when writing descriptive scenes.

As part of story time, we have learnt some firm favourites using Makaton including Brown Bear Brown Bear and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Can You Hear? As we have children in our school who use Makaton to communicate, it is important that we are learning so that everyone can have a conversation!

In spelling, we have used Spelling with The Jungle Club to learn some key rules including dropping the ‘e’ before adding suffixes to a root word with a split digraph and remembering to keep the ‘e’ when adding an ‘s.’ We have also revisited key GPCs from year one including ‘ay’ ‘ai’ and ‘ee’ ‘ea’ ‘_y.’ Some children have started to apply this knowledge into their writing. Children who access Wonderland have had the opportunity to apply their phonics knowledge in different ways with a focus on blending.

Maths
This half term we have practiced using our maths toolkits which include base 10, bundles of straws and arrow cards. Some children have also used Numicon. Beginning the year with place value, the children have been learning how to partition tens and ones, count in tens, compare numbers and have practiced 1 more, 1 less, 10 more, 10 less. Following on from this, we have developed skills in measure – particularly around length and mass. The children who access Wonderland enjoyed measuring within provision and showing the length in different ways including Numicon and base 10. We have now started on addition and subtraction, something that will take us in the first couple of weeks of Autumn 2. The children have already started to find missing numbers within number sentences and have begun to develop the skill of counting on a number line (their rulers).