Week 10: Christmas is coming

 Hello Class 2 Parents,

This week marked the start of Christmas in Class 2: we had our first read-through of the Nativity. The children are all very excited and will come home with their lines to learn. Please help them to learn them by heart, saying them loudly and clearly (apart from the narrators, who have tricky things to say and will have a script to read from... they just need to practise reading confidently and beautifully!).

Aside from that, the children had an important meeting today with Miss Jones from the Smith & Jones Building Co. She had received their letters and wanted to meet with them to discuss their concerns. The children explained that they didn't want the habitat to be destroyed and for all of the animals to lose their homes or, worse, be killed. It took a while, but in the end Miss Jones agreed that her company really didn't want to destroy all those habitats, but needed to build the homes somewhere. Next week the children will look into some alternative locations for the new homes. 


In phonics the Year 1 children have been learning all about vowels. They have learnt the long and short sounds for them, using their hands to help. See if they can show you this. They have been learning that the single letters can make both the long and short sounds:

a     as in hat and baby
e     as in peg and secret
i      as in pig and find
o     as in bog and post
u.   as in hug and tuna

In spellings the Year 2 children have been learning to spell words starting with 'wr'. Their spellings are here. 

In Maths:

Year 1 children have continued to look at part whole diagrams. They learnt how to find a missing part, but subtracting the known part from the whole (e.g. if the whole is 9, and one part is 5, they subtract 5 from 9 to get 4, the other part). They have also learnt how to write subtraction number sentences to match a part whole model. 

Year 2 children have been learning how to find fact families and have also been learning how to check a calculation by either:

* drawing a pictorial represenation of it, or
* using the inverse (e.g. to check 20 - 4 = 16, they would add 16 and 4 together to see if it makes 20)

There is no maths homework this week because I would like you all to get a good start on learning your Nativity words! Maths homework will resume next week. 

Please also, of course, continue to read with your children as often as possible!

Have a good weekend

Mrs Simpson