Year 2

Autumn Term- Literacy

This half term we have been working hard to consolidate our understanding of what a sentence is. We used our previous Year 1 learning to help us to write question, statement and command sentences. We also wrote sentences with the pronoun ‘I’ and learnt that every sentence always starts with a capital letter.

More recently we have really enjoyed sharing the text ‘The Last Wolf’ by Mini Grey. It is an interesting take on the story of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. The main character Red discovers endangered animals living in a tree cave and she tries to help them. We have made some super predictions about the text. We have also enjoyed learning about the black rhino as a critically endangered animal. We wrote some non-chronological reports about rhinos where we placed our information into appropriate sections and used subheadings like ‘Diet’ and ‘Habitat’ to organise our facts.

Autumn Term- Maths

We have been working hard to develop our knowledge of place value and have completed many challenges to help us gain a better understanding of tens and ones as place holders in 2-digit numbers. We have used part-whole models, place value charts and pictorial representations to help us develop this fundamental mathematical knowledge.

The concrete resources ‘Base 10’ and 'Numicon' have been used frequently to help us partition numbers and solve problems. We have been comparing numbers using ‘more than’, ’less than’ and ‘equal to’ symbols. 

We have also worked hard on addition and subtraction. We have used part-whole models to make fact families. We have also used number lines to help us solve subtraction calculations and we have worked on adding and subtracting 1 and 10 from a number.

As well as addition and subtraction, Year 2 have been gaining a better knowledge of times tables facts for the 2, 5 and 10 times tables. Also, children have been working hard at school and at home on their Maths passport, containing mental maths targets. 

Autumn Term- Science

Year 2 have been developing their understanding of ‘Living Things and Their Habitats’ and have loved learning about different categories of animals and the basic needs of all animals. We have explored and compared the differences between things that are living, dead, and things that have never been alive. We have identified that most living things live in habitats which suit their needs. We were able to explore some microhabitats within the school grounds and survey the minibeasts living within these habitats. During one of our lessons, we created a poster all about pollution and we considered how habitats can become damaged by humans making it more difficult for animals to thrive. We also learnt about food chains and that animals depend on each other as well as plant life to survive.

Autumn Term- Geography

Children in Year 2 have been learning all about food and where it comes from. We were really excited to use a mapping website to plot the origin of different types of staple food. We found out that a lot of apples come from New Zealand and some satsumas come from South Africa. We studied the local journey of milk in Guernsey from the farm to our fridges and we also investigated the journey of a banana from countries such as Colombia or Costa Rica to our supermarkets in Guernsey. We were amazed to discover that a banana can take weeks to get to our shops! Since learning about where our food comes from, we have been very interested to check our food packaging at home and at snack time to see where our food came from.