Year 2 Weekly Update – 24/02/23

Dear Parents,

Please find the weekly update below. Our new topic for this half term is ‘The Scented Garden’. In a separate email to follow, you will find a knowledge organiser containing useful vocabulary and a recommended book list that you may wish to use to support your child’s learning.

Please see below for this week’s words that will be assessed in an assessment next week. Please support your child with learning these at home. Most of these words have an /?/ sound spelt ‘a’ after ‘w’ and ‘qu’. Some are common exception words that do not follow typical phonetic rules.

Maths: This week the children have begun their new unit in Maths, Multiplication and Division. In this block, the children will be making the connection between repeated addition and multiplication. During our first lesson, the children started to make this connection by recognising equal groups. It was important that children were able to explore both equal and unequal groups, so that they were able to identify when groups are or are not equal and explain why. At this point, the addition and multiplication symbols are not used, but the language around this will be used to support learning later. We will be using sentence stems to support the children in identifying the groups, finding how many are in each group and developing language around repeated addition. The children will then use this knowledge over the next set of lessons to complete multiplication calculations as repeated addition.

The children have progressed from being to identify equal groups to then making equal groups with a given number of objects. They began by identifying the equal groups and then matching equal groups to numerals and words, which then they represented the equal groups by drawing pictures. The children developed an understanding of what was the same and what was different within different representations. Moving on, the children applied their understanding of equal groups to find a total using repeated addition. The children were supported with sentence stems to scaffold their learning and they were able to use accurate language when describing pictures. Counting in 2s, 3s, 5s and 10s, the children were able to add up to three groups of any 1 digit number to find the total.

Art: During our Art session this week, we will be discussing with the children signs that show that spring has arrived, e.g. blossom on trees, leaves and bulbs. We then use this knowledge when studying a famous artist, Georgia O’Keeffe, her use of bright colours and how she has taken inspiration from nature will be our main focal point. The children will be shown a selection of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work, we will use these images to zoom in and create our own sketch of a flower, including all of the detail we can see. Later the children will be using oil pastels to finish their picture in bright colours.