Welcome to our class of Year 2 and 3

We can’t quite believe we’ve reached Term 5 already! Which means we have just one more term to follow before completing our academic year.

Let’s find out where our learning journey is going to take us this term…

Take a look at our learning environment:

Wider Learning

Our wider learning this term will allow us to focus on our Geography skills. We will be making geographical comparisons, comparing a region within the UK to others across the world. We will be travelling to Europe and to South America on our learning journey. During our visit to each region, we will be exploring the physical and human geography there, identifying and recognising how this differs from different regions across the world or perhaps how they in fact share similarities.

This term we are also following the theme of ‘food’ in Design Technology. It was interesting to discuss foods we like and dislike in our class for our introductory lesson, identifying a wide variety of foods as we designed our own healthy meal.

PE this term will involve us developing our Athletics skills of running, jumping and throwing; with a key focus on Handball. We are looking forward to the weather warming up, giving us more opportunities to learn outside.

Don’t forget that you can find a copy of our weekly timetable, along with other useful resources and information about our class right here on our class page.

English

This term we are exploring different genres of writing, beginning with recount writing. We have identified that this text type informs us of past events; things that we have already done. We have been able to identify features needed, including past tense verbs and time connectives. We are working towards writing our own recount.

As we are a split year group, we will continue to have separate spelling sessions for Year 2s and Year 3s. This is to ensure we are learning age appropriate skills to support our English learning – and of course skills that can be applied across our curriculum as a whole. To support us with our learning, a weekly activity will be set on Spelling Shed every Monday for the children to access at home. These activities will relate to those spellings that have been set for them.

You can access Spelling Shed via this link: https://play.edshed.com/

Maths

As we continue our theme of age appropriate learning for our children in Deer Class, our Year 2s and Year 3s will be taught separately for Maths as we continue to follow our Power Maths scheme. This term our Year 2s will begin exploring division, relating this to last term’s learning on multiplication. Our Year 3s will also be learning about multiplication and division.This term Year Two will be learning about properties of shapes. We will be identifying 2D and 3D shapes, exploring their characteristics and properties using a range of mathematical language (including sides, vertices, edges etc.) Whilst our Year 3s will begin the term studying money. We will look closely at units of money, including pounds and pence, using wider maths skills (addition and subtraction) as we problem solve using real life scenarios to support our learning.

To help develop and secure our knowledge of our times tables every child has access to Times Table Rockstars. This wonderful resource allows time to practise our times tables in a fun and engaging way. It can also get very competitive, similar to Spelling Shed, and who doesn’t like being at the top of the leader board? We know we want to see Deer Class up there!

You can access TT Rockstars via this link: https://ttrockstars.com/

Guided Skills

Across the year Guided Skills has been a key focus of ours in Deer Class, using our timetabled sessions to develop a wide range of learning areas; including spelling, guided reading and mental maths.

Term 5 has seen a key change to our Guided Skills timetable however, as we are having whole class guided reading sessions. During these sessions, we will be using VIPERS to support our understanding in reading – focusing on reading skills that go beyond simply word reading.

These are the skills we will be exploring in our sessions:

The excitement around our whole class text ‘Alice in Wonderland’ has been wonderful. Only a few sessions in, we have had meaningful discussions around the illustrations, using these to make predictions, whilst beginning to explore the vocabulary used by the author.

Reading for Pleasure

As a school we want to develop a passion for reading amongst our children, providing them with opportunities to explore and read texts that they love. In order to do so, every Wednesday the children are invited to bring in their own texts from home if they wish to do so, or books will be available in school, where we will have dedicated time to read, share and simply enjoy these books. These could be non-fiction texts, fictional stories, comics, newspapers etc. As long as it’s something they love and want to read. As teaching staff we will also be bringing in texts that we love, modelling and sharing our enthusiasm for reading.