The Final Half Term Begins!

 Hello Class 2 Parents,

The final half term has begun!

It has started very well. The children have started some non-fiction reports on crocodiles, to help us to identify the Enormous Crocodile if we do find him in Kenya. They've done some maths and spellings as well as observing the changes that have been happening to the beans they planted before half term. 

The highlight of the week was, of course, our trip to Salcey Forest on Thursday. We had a really lovely day. It started with a one-and-a-half mile walk to spot trees and minibeasts. The children were incredibly observant, spotting many minibeasts - in particular caterpillars! Next we found somewhere to have lunch and build dens. There was a lot of excellent team work on show and some fantastic dens were made. After lunch we walked to another part of the woods where the children created some animal homes including squirrel dreys, fox dens and owl nests. There was also an unexpected gruffalo that needed a home. 

The children were all fantastic - they did the school proud with their behaviour and enthusiasm. 

In other learning this week:

Maths:
The year one children have continued their work on multiplication by making and adding equal groups. They learnt how to write a repeated addition number sentence to find out 'how many altogether.' 

The year two children have continued their work on time, revisiting 'quarter to' and 'quarter past' and learning how to read the time in five minute intervals. For this, we created a human clock on the playground! It's quite a tricky skill to learn, but they did a good job!

The Year 1 homework is here.

The Year 2 homework is to use this interactive clock to practise making and telling the time. You could:

* set your child different times to make (quarter to, quarter past, and five minute intervals, e.g:

five/ten/quarter/twenty/twenty-five to
five/ten/quarter/twenty/twenty-five past

Phonics and spellings:

The Phonics Check is next week, so the phonics group has been doing a lot of practice this week. Their homework is to do some more practise ready for next week. Just as a reminder - all children have to take part in the phonics screening check. It will not be anything for them to worry about - we have done lots of 1:1 practice and they are familiar with the format.  You can practise reading alien words and real words by playing this game: choose:

Phase 4 sounds first (to practise blends such as br, cr, bl)

Phase 5 sounds next (to practise phase 5 graphemes)

Choose all of the blends and all of the digraphs each time - we've learnt them all!

The spellings group has been learning all about homophones - words that sound the same, but are spelt differently and have different meanings, such as:

son/sun
write/right
hare/hair

There are no spellings to learn this week, instead please complete this sheet which will be in their home learning folders.

You can also, of course, continue to practise spelling the common exception words with your children :o) They've made a lot of progress with them this year!

Have a great weekend (it's supposed to be summer temperatures!) and enjoy the photos of Salcey Forest you can find here. 

From Mrs Simpson