Welcome to Squirrel class! We are taught by Mrs Thomas and Mrs Rose, who are both really fun and full of creative ideas. Mrs Thomas has been teaching for seven years and says her favourite things are eating good food and going on adventures! Mrs Rose has been teaching for fifteen years, loves cooking and is a massive Crystal Palace fan.

• All about Year 2 - watch our introductory video
• Our curriculum map - find out about our current topics
• Our latest class newsletter
• Meet our School Councillors, Avik and Lexi  

Home learning ideas:

• We're working on fractions this term, so look for opportunities to practice these skills when you're out and about: 
  • Cut pizzas into fractions - how can we cut it so that all four of us get an equal sized piece? What do we call this fraction? 
  • Share out food together - can we split this cake into thirds or find half of these sweets? Try different ways of sharing - cutting into portions, counting out an equal number for each person or splitting things into groups - which method makes the most sense for whatever you’re trying to do? 
  • When making drinks, practice filling cups half or three-quarters full, helping your child to learn what these words mean, and which fractions are bigger than others.
• Constant practice of reading and phonics is just about the most valuable thing you can do at home. Try to read with your child as often as possible and talk to them about what they’ve read. We've put together some advice and guidance on using the books your child will bring home, here.
  
• Share stories, pictures, postcards and mementos from seaside trips in the past. What things did you do at the seaside? Why did you go to that particular place? If you’ve been to the seaside in different countries, think about what is similar and different about all these places.
  
• We’re learning all about seeds, plants and growth this term, so a bit of gardening at home would be a great way to build on this knowledge. Plant seeds or flowers in the back garden or grow cress on the windowsill, and think about what these plants need in order to grow well (and what happens to them when we forget to water them!) 
  

Our latest news:

• School Council elections - One of our first tasks this term was to elect our new School Councillors. We thought carefully about the skills we thought a good class representative should have, what we liked about our school and how it could be improved further. Building on this, we then drew on all our understanding to write speeches (with a bit of help from our mums and dads), ’selling’ ourselves to the rest of our class and showing why we’d be the perfect Councillor. It was a tough choice, with loads of us making fantastic speeches, but once voting was complete and all the ballots had been counted, we elected Avik and Lexi. You can read their speeches here.
 
• As part of our Mental Health Week, we visited Fairlands Park . We art from nature, hugged trees, carried out surveys and went on the hunt for different mini-beasts, plants, leaves, trees and animals. It was lovely to get out into our environment and gave us plenty of opportunities to talk about what we can do to relax, deal with life’s stresses and look after our own mental health. 
 

 
• In science , we have been learning about materials. We have investigated what floats and what sinks (playdoh doesn't float - we were surprised), tested the strength of different materials by building bridges (uncooked spaghetti is surprisingly strong) and this week we explored different ways to change the shape of materials. We tried stretching, squeezing, twisting and bending - and, as you can see here, we tried very hard to find out what you can (and cannot) cut through!  
 

We have been learning about... 

Science & DT - We investigated the work of famous inventors. We read and wrote biographies of Thomas Edison, Charles Macintosh, the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford, and then designed our own amazing inventions to help solve everyday problems (like cleaning our rooms and doing our homework!) We had great fun junk-modelling our designs, and then wrote descriptions of how they worked.

English - In the first half of the term we read and learnt the story of Where the Wild Things Are. We arrived at school to find a boat had appeared and after some in depth discussions we established it belonged to Max from Where the Wild Things Are. We learnt the actions to retell the story and thought in depth about the settings. We have developed our understanding of adjectives and verbs and now know what a noun is.

Maths - We have been exploring number in depth over the last few weeks, building our understanding of place value with two digit numbers using a variety of counting manipulatives. We have been able to count on in ones and tens and thought about how the digits change when we do this. Our chanting of 2s, 5s and 10s is taking place daily, and we are also spending lots of time rehearsing our counting to 100 so we can recognise the numbers confidently.

This term's topics

English - We will begin the term by returning to story writing, exploring ‘defeating the monster’ tales through our model text, The Tale of the Paperbag Princess.. We will explore monsters in a range of other stories, and then look at the way language and description are used to bring these creatures to life (and make them seem super scary!) We will then create our own individual monsters, which will become the focus of our own ‘defeating the monster’ tales. Throughout the term, we will be learning the spelling rules linked to plurals (eg. half à halves, fly à flies etc), as well as continuing to develop our phonic knowledge in our daily Read Write Inc sessions. We will also continue to practise our joined handwriting across the curriculum. 

Maths - We will begin the term by developing our understanding of fractions. We will begin by finding halves, quarters and thirds of shapes and amounts through division and sharing. We will then look at simple equivalences, identifying that two quarters are the same as one half, two halves are the same as one whole etc.

Science - We will be learning about seeds, bulbs and plants this half-term. We will explore the features that plants share and learn to describe the basic structure. We will describe the way that seeds grow and develop into mature plants, and will conduct our own experiments to test how plants are affected by their environment. Finally we will explore what plants need in order to stay healthy.

Humanities - In our geography lessons, we will be learning about seaside environments. We will discuss what people do when they go on seaside holidays and learn about natural and man-made features that we find in these places. We will then choose a specific seaside resort to investigate further (selected based on our own experiences) and compare this town with life in Stevenage.

Take a look at our curriculum map for more information on our topics.