Welcome to Y2

In this year group you will find two classes, Squirrels and Hedgehog.

Y2 is all about learning with friends, developing new skills, enjoying the challenge of new experiences and gaining delight from reaching personal goals. Our broad curriculum allows each child to develop the attitude, behaviour and skills they need to equip them for lifelong learning.

Each day we begin with Early Morning Activities, which is an opportunity for a calm transition from home. Our first session of the day is Phonics. At Moorlands, we follow the Phonics Scheme, Read, Write, Inc and all teachers and teaching assistants have taken part in high quality training, in order to deliver effective Phonics lessons, supporting children’s development with reading. Y2 pupils benefit from taking home well-matched phonetically decodable reading books, helping families to support their child’s development at home, whilst keeping in line with our Phonics scheme. In Y2 pupils also love to choose from our range of ‘reading for pleasure’ books, instilling a love for reading.

To support families understanding of Phonics, Please use this website for further information regarding Read, Write Inc. https://www.ruthmiskin.com/en/about-us/mission/

There is also a specific page dedicated to families: https://www.ruthmiskin.com/en/parents-copy-2/

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 session follows phonics and gives children an opportunity to develop positive attitudes towards writing as well as building stamina to write for different purposes.

After morning breaktime, we sharpen our Maths skills with a short Numbersense session before we have the daily maths lesson. In Y2, we endeavour to deliver learning in mathematics which engages the curiosity of all our learners. Our curriculum is mapped by the White Rose Maths Hub scheme of work. We focus on a progression from concrete resources to pictorial representations and finally into the numerical abstract to aid our children’s conceptual understanding. This approach builds confidence in all our learners, especially in areas of problem solving and reasoning.

Following lunch we have our dedicated whole class Reading session, 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.

Most afternoons, we will usually do one of the foundation subjects, such as PE, science, Geography History, etc, which is of ten linked to the term’s topic. If you’d like to find out a bit more about our curriculum, please click here (Under review)

Once a week we are lucky enough to have an Outdoor Learning lesson with our specialist teacher, exploring the school grounds. The children also have some time looking at computing on the school’s Ipads, Laptops or Chromebooks. Where possible we try to supplement our school curriculum with trips and opportunities to learn from appropriate visitors.

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

Class Dojo is our main mode of communication with parents. We regularly post videos, photos and information about the weeks learning. Y2 is all about gaining independence and confidence in preparation for the children’s transition to KS2.