Hello and apologies in advance for the long post! Specific homework tasks will be posted once we get settled back fully into the term. We are still working out the best way to do this so please bear with us. These are the main priorities for reading maths and spelling that you can support with at home.
Reading: All children have been heard reading this week and have also completed phonics checks to informally assess their ability to recognise graphemes and blend for reading and segment for spelling. A new reading log and book should be ready to take home by tomorrow. I am sorry this has taken longer than we would like but I really wanted to check book bands before starting to send reading books home. Any reading books that need changing should be returned to school on a Friday with a ‘book finished please change’ comment or similar recorded in the reading log. Books will then be changed. We will not be able to change them more than once a week at the moment. Because of this, can I remind you that you can access additional ebooks on either https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/find-a-book/library-page/ or on the EPIC website. Mrs Gardner has transferred to me the records for all year one pupils that had registered for EPIC through her. If you didn’t register during lockdown and would like to be included, please do send me your email address. (My school email address was on the newsletter sent home last week). Please do try and read with your child as much as possible, it really does help, thank-you in advance.
Spelling: All children in class 2 are recapping or starting the phase 5 phonics programme and are having daily 25 minute phonics sessions at the moment. The Department for Education has stated that all current year 2 pupils nationally will need to take the formal phonics screening check during the second part of the Autumn term. This is the check that they would have done during the summer term of year one. We are working towards supporting the children in becoming confident in applying their phonics as an aid to fluent reading and spelling. I am posting screen shots of the phase 2-5 and also year 1 and year 2 common exception words. These are the ‘tricky’ words that are not phonically decodable and therefore just have to be learned by heart. Frequent or daily reading of these words will help them to stick in their memory and they will also come accross them in their reading books. The aim is to be able to comfortably read the words from one phase then be able to spell them then move onto the next phase. As you can imagine class 2 are all at different places with this and your help with supporting your child to learn these words is greatly appreciated. Please have a look at the lists and see how your child fits in. In the long-term we may be able to send set spelling lists home weekly, for now I am hoping to put a small pack of home learning resources together to support English and maths, which will include the word lists below.
Maths: Our main focus this half term will be place value. Class 2 will looking at extending their knowledge of numbers upto 100 including recognising each number and being able to write it the correct way round. Lots of children commonly write number digits backwards, especially 2 and 5, so just allowing you child to practise writing numbers is great or making a game of it and playing bingo is great too. We will also consolidate work on recognising tens and units and being able to partition numbers, for example, knowing that 52 is made up of five tens and 2 units and that 52 is bigger than 25 and being able to explain how they know. Some children will still continue to work on numbers between 1 and 20 and that is fine too as they will progress at their own pace, but numbers upto 100 are part of the year 2 maths curriculum. Other things to practise are recapping the year one objective of learning number bonds to 10 (the sets of four number facts that make ten including both addition and subtraction pairs) such as:
1+9 = 10
9+ 1 = 10
10 – 9 = 1
10 – 1 = 9
We had great fun chalking them on the playground on Monday! After that the progession is to apply this to quickly learning number bonds to 20 as part of the year 2 curriculum.
A good website to visit for maths games is http://www.topmarks.co.uk
Writing: Please try to spend a little time watching how your child forms their letters and to check if they can write all the letters of the alphabet (lower case) out of order. Letter formation becomes really important in year 2 as many children will start to join up their handwriting and if the letters do not start and finish in the right place, it makes joining very tricky. Next thing is size! We are doing daily handwriting practise to develop a neat and consistent handwriting size which fits between the lines on the page. When children write on blank rather than lined paper, handwriting can suddenly become gigantic!
Finally the children all have Purple Mash logins from last year. A reminder of the login will be sellotaped into the front of the reading logs as soon as possible. This year we will be encouraging the class to log on to the school computer independently and then log on to Purple mash independently. To log on to the school computers, the children need to be able to spell their surname. We do have cards for them to copy but practising writing their full names at home is really helpful. I will set up some optional tasks on Purple Mash than can be accessed through the ‘2do’ tab.
Apologies again for the length of the post, I hope you made it to the end! Please do telephone the school office or email me if there is anything I can help with, Mrs Platten