Hello! Welcome back to the second half of the Spring term! 

We will be looking at The Queen’s Handbag. 

 We will be linking our Geography and English lessons to this and we are looking forward to seeing where this topic takes us. 

Word of the Week –  

A new word is set each Monday. We tell the children the word, we learn what the word means and we try our best to use it in our sentences throughout the week! House points are given if it used correctly! So many children continue to go home and discuss the words and bring in synonyms to show us – thank you so much! This task is amazing we have noticed all the children using these words more and expanding their vocabulary. Please keep up the great work! We look forward to sharing this half terms word with you soon. Remember to check your child’s diary every Monday for the word! 😊 

WOW Moments –  

Please remember to send us in your WOW moments at home. This could be an achievement of any kind. Has your child been swimming, earnt a badge. Taken part in brownies/beavers, been litter picking to support the local environment or even shown a lovely act of kindness. We would love to share these moments with the children’s peers. We have lots more WOW moment cards we can send home! 

English   

Reading/Phonics/Spellings:  

In Phonics, the children will continue to work on the Song of Sounds. We will recap sounds they are unsure of before moving onto the next stages. They will aim to read common words by sight (particularly Common Exemption words), whilst still sounding out unfamiliar words as well as writing written answers to comprehension questions. They will learn further spelling patterns and rules, and begin to apply those in their writing. During guided reading we follow 'Reading Dogs'.   

Each half term we will have a reading dog focus which their reading tasks will be based on.  In Autumn 1 we learnt to predict. In Autumn 2 we learnt to retrieve information from the text. The first half of the term we focused on Suki Sequencing. This means that she loves to put things in the right order. The children used this skill well when writing their instructions. 

This half term we are focusing on Victor Vocabulary.  

You can support at home by asking these questions: 

Our spellings are linked to the sounds we are learning each week in our phonics lessons. Please see below for the spelling list.

Please support your child at home to read these tricky words. They are tricky because we can not sound them out. See if you can spot them in your childs reading book, magazines, posters and whatever else you many have at home!

These are the tricky words we will continue to read and spell this half term:

Writing:

Children will learn to write for a range of purposes including stories, poetry and real events. Grammar becomes even more important in Year 1 and Year 2.  At Silver End we follow the 'Talk for Writing' approach for teaching writing.  This has three phases: imitation, innovation and invention.  This half term our book hook is ‘The Queen’s Handbag’. We are going to learn the story and innovate it to create our own. We are using the book to learn about progressive verbs, adjectives, suffixes and we will continue to develop our editing skills.

HELP FROM HOME –

Writing sentences together will help the children to practise writing sentences with all the key skills they have learnt. Capital letters at the beginning of the sentence, clear finger spaces, joined up writing, using ‘and’ and punctuation at the end (. ? !)

Anything you do we would love to see!

Maths 

We will be teaching maths through the 'Power Maths' scheme.  Power Maths is a UK curriculum mastery programme designed to spark curiosity and excitement and nurture confidence in maths.  This term in Year 1 and 2 we will be looking Fractions; finding halves ½, quarters ¼ of both numbers and objects. We will be using lanugage such as whole, part, numerator and denominator.

We will then be moving onto:

Year 1- Place Value- Numbers to 50

Year 2- Statistics- looking at block diagrams, pictograms and tally charts

After this we will be spending some time looking at Shape. We will be recognising and naming 2D and 3D shapes, investigating lines of symmetry and creating patterns with shapes.

You could support your children by showing them fractions in real life contexts, counting up to 50 forwards and backwards. Can you do some data collecting at home and explore different ways of representing your findings and also exploring what 2D and 3D shapes you can find around the home. 

Connected Curriculum- Theme 

Our Theme this term is called Explorers. We will be focusing on the subject Geography and linking other subject areas to these.

This half term we will be looking at the 4 countries of the United Kingdom. We will be using the text: The Queen’s handbag and going off on an adventure around the United Kingdom to find out about each country and their capital city. If you have been to visit any of these countries and have any pictures of your visit or souvenirs please feel free to share them with us. We will also be exploring different maps of the United Kingdom and the distance between Silver End and each of the 4 captial cities from the countries of the United Kingdom.

Science

In Science this term we will be focusing on Plants. The children will learn to name the basic parts of a plant, including seeds. They will have the opportunity to plant their own bean plant and to make observations of how they grow over time in a bean diary. Children will also learn to identify, name and describe a variety of garden and wild plants as well as evergreen and deciduous trees. Towards the end of the topic, the children will use all of their knowledge gained throughout the topic to identify, compare and classify different plants.