Squirrel and Hedgehog Classes

Welcome to Year 2

Year 2 is all about learning with friends, developing new skills, enjoying the challenge of new experiences and gaining delight from reaching personal goals. Our broad and engaging curriculum allows each child to develop the attitude, behaviour and skills they need to equip them for lifelong learning.

Our early morning learning opportunities, which begin each day, are valuable chances to revisit, recap and consolidate prior learning, as well as a chance to instil a love of calm, quiet reading.

We deliver daily phonics sessions, which follow the Read, Write, Inc scheme, and all teachers and teaching assistants have taken part in high quality training to ensure effective, precise phonics lessons, which support children’s development with reading. Year 2 children benefit from taking home well-matched phonetically decodable reading books, helping families to support their child’s development at home, while ensuring maximum benefit from our phonics scheme. In Year 2, children also love to choose from our range of ‘reading for pleasure’ books, instilling a love for reading.

Once children have mastered phonic decoding, they transition to the Read, Write, Inc spelling programme, where children learn spelling rules and patterns, which they can then apply to their reading and writing.

Our writing sessions use the skills and knowledge that the children have developed through their phonics learning and give the children an opportunity to develop positive attitudes towards writing as well as building stamina to write for different purposes.

The children are able to develop increased fluency in addition and subtraction facts through the Number Sense Maths Number Facts programme. Additionally, in Year 2, we endeavour to deliver maths learning which engages the curiosity of all of our learners. We focus on a progression from concrete resources to pictorial representations and finally into the numerical abstract to aid children’s conceptual understanding. This approach builds confidence in all our learners, especially in areas of problem solving and reasoning.

We have daily, dedicated, whole class Reading sessions, where we develop our reading skills using VIPERS (vocabulary, inference, prediction, explain, retrieve and sequence.) This enables the children to apply these skills and to deepen their understanding of reading.

Our wider curriculum learning includes subjects such as PE, Science, Geography History, RE and Geography. Each term has a theme which is driven by one of our wider curriculum subjects.

We are tremendously lucky at Moorlands to have such spectacular and beautiful grounds, which provide a fantastic variety of learning opportunities. As well as using the outdoor spaces to enhance our learning across the curriculum, we have a dedicated Outdoor Learning session each week.

Computing and ‘digital literacy’ (learning how to be safe and responsible online) are an important part of our curriculum and we use iPads and laptops to support this learning. Our curriculum is further enhanced by educational visits,

We celebrate the achievements of the children through our LEARN Values which are:

• Lead by example
• Engage and enjoy
• Achieve your best
• Respect everyone
• Never give up

Alongside this, we also ensure high standards of behaviour through the use of our routines:

• Wonderful Walking
• Legendary Lining up
• Terrific Transitions
• Moorlands Manners