Class 5 | West Street Community Primary

Class 5

Mrs Milner

Hello and welcome to Class 5!

We aim to make learning as interesting as possible with a cross curricular approach enabling children to demonstrate their strengths. With close links to home we are able to ensure that every child is happy and gets the most out of their learning.

Year 2 is an important year in your child’s schooling as we prepare for the End of Key Stage 1 statutory tests. Through our day to day work we develop skills and resilience to support the pupils in these assessments and to ensure they are able to maximise their potential and, above all, do their very best.

Reading is an essential part of learning across all areas in the curriculum and a child’s everyday school life. Reading aloud with children is known to be the single most important activity for building the knowledge and skills they will eventually require for learning to read.

If your child reads to an adult or older child three or more times each week they will become a Reading Star and entered into the weekly draw. This is an opportunity to win a prize of their choice in class. When you listen to your child read, give them encouraging comments and ask lots of questions, for example: “How do you know he is sad?” “What word tells me they have no money?” “Tell me three things that show us he is excited about his birthday.”

In our English lessons, we use Power of Reading texts to inspire the children’s writing and give real purpose to the children’s work. In Class 5, we read a wide range of genres including fiction and non-fiction books and aim to nurture a love of literature. We also have daily whole class guided reading sessions.

In Year 2, we cover a vast range of books, varying in structure, story types and book types, from picture books to longer novels which encourage reading stamina. Through the Power of Reading, our English lessons give a lot of importance to discussion, role play and exploring illustrations. We use the text to write a number of different text types throughout the half term, such as narratives, poetry, letters, diaries and information texts. This regular visit of a range of genres throughout the year allows children to develop their skills as writers. The Power of Reading teaching sequences and teaching approaches really engage the children in the books they are reading and leave them looking forward to the next session. The texts are carefully selected to relate to the children and give them a lot of inspiration for their writing.

Spelling is an important part of the English curriculum and we have a strong focus on this. Children in Year 2 continue to learn Synthetic Phonics and apply this in their writing.

Through the ‘No Nonsense Spelling’ scheme, children are taught the spelling rules applicable to Year 2 learners and the common exception words which do not follow these rules.

We encourage children to practise their spellings at least three times each week, ready for a test on Friday.

Year 1 and Year 2 spelling list
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Preview

As a school, we have moved to a mastery approach to Maths. This involves a focus on concrete materials, to pictorial to abstract throughout lessons, to really consolidate children’s understanding of number and place value. During lessons, we begin with fluency based problems, moving onto reasoning and problem solving questions to deepen the children’s understanding.

In Maths there is a strong focus on place value, arithmetic and understanding the number system. We will ensure that your child is able to use this learning to reason and solve problems, giving explanations for their thinking. They will transfer these skills to be able to work with money; measure time- including o’clock, half past and quarter to and past, plus reading the time to five minutes; length; weight and then use this information to solve reasoning problems. Children will increase their ability to read and handle data and statistics in addition to developing their skills in geometry- understanding the properties of 2D and 3D shapes.

The skills your child learns to solve problems will be applied to help them to understand fractions of shapes and number. As well as working to find half, and one quarter, your child will be progressing to finding three quarters and a third.
They will be expected to know multiplication facts in the 2, 5 and 10 times tables up to 12 x 2, 12 x 5 and 12 x 10 as well as counting forward and back in steps of 2, 3, 5 and 10. The more help you can give to your child to learn and practise any of these skills, the deeper their understanding of Maths will be.

Our curriculum is creative and topic based in order to engage pupils with their learning. In Year 2 we cover a range of topics, including a story based theme, as well as History, Geography and Science based topics.

These change half termly and each new theme is introduced with a WOW! Launch, after which the children decide what they would like to find out about and they contribute to deciding an outcome for the end of the project.

This is often presented to the rest of the school or another audience.

We are proud to be able to take our children on trips using the school minibus. These include visits during the school day and reward trips, some of which are held on a Saturday. In addition, school trips have included visits to the seaside and nature reserves, farm visits and more.

As well as enriching our children through outings to places of interest, we welcome visitors into school. All these experiences develop a wider understanding of the world, increasing vocabulary, creating memories for life and helping our children to develop in confidence.

Throughout the school we use the Class Dojo reward system. Children can earn Dojo Points for a huge range of reasons from work in class to good manners and from asking good questions to being a reading star! This system also allows parents to keep in touch with their child’s learning and their good behaviour by signing up to Class Dojo. Additionally it provides a secure messaging service directly to the class teacher.

If you would like to sign up to Class Dojo, please see your child’s teacher who will give you a unique reference number to access your child’s Dojo Points through this link…
https://www.classdojo.com

Children receive a homework task each week along with a set of spellings to learn. These are all based upon the current skills being developed in class and this added practise gives parents and carers an opportunity to talk about what their child is learning and to build upon the skills taught so far.

I am happy to discuss homework with you if ever there are any problems. Certainly Maths looks a lot different to when we were at school! We appreciate that and are happy to help.

Children are asked to read at home, at least three times each week and to have their reading record signed with a comment if possible.