Birch is a class of 28 Y2 pupils and we have Mrs Shardlow as our class teacher. We are also supported by our regular helpers, to hear the children read at least twice a week
In our class, we follow the Y2 National Curriculum in addition to the Nottinghamshire syllabus for RE and the Nottinghamshire Computing Framework.
We are working with our teacher, Mrs Shardlow to develop a ‘Reading inspired Curriculum’ with the added addition of making this curriculum as creative and as engaging as we can to meet all the differing learning styles of children have. Mrs Shardlow leads this area of School Development work in addition to coordinating our ‘Pupil Voice’ initiative. This means that our class are developing ways to ensure we are challenged in our learning across the curriculum and are developing as self-regulated learners with confidence, independence and an ability to take measured risks in our learning endeavours.
What do we learn about in Year 2?
First half of the Autumn term – This term our topic is The Victorians, based on the Charles Dickens text ‘Oliver Twist’. We base lots of our learning around this fabulous book and use this text to help us to explore and investigate our Enquiry question ‘Was life always hard in Victorian Britain?’ We go on a class trip to Perelthorpe adventure base where we are able to experience life in Victorian schools. Through generating all of this knowledge we apply it to our historical work and create fantastic pieces of written work with sophisticated vocabulary and techniques in our work.
Second half of the Autumn term – Our topic is another text by Charles Dickens, ‘The Christmas Carol’ This text has been adapted to meet the age and stage of learners in year 2. We link a rhyming Christmas Carol text with the Muppets Christmas Carol to make our learning fun and enjoyable. We are able to develop and create a variety of writing techniques such as diary writing, persuasive texts and character descriptions. We are also able to compare and contrast 2 different texts by the same author.
First half of the Spring term – This term our topic is called ‘Around the World’ and it is based around Flat Stanley. We find out all about the 7 continents and 5 oceans. We make our own flat characters and send them to relatives all around the world!
Second half of the Spring Term – This term our topic is ‘Traction Man’. During this topic pupils will be developing their own superhero and learning to support their texts with speech developing the skills of using and applying inverted commas and expanded noun phrases. Moving into 2023/2024 our topic will be based on the Great Fire of London. which is based around numerous texts both fiction and non-fiction. We use drama to re-enact the events of the fire and write diary entries as if we were there. We also make our own models of the houses and other fire based artwork!
First Half of the Summer Term – This term our topic is based on the text ‘The Leaf’’. We learn about the effects of climate change and how this impacts animals. We follow the journey of a polar bear who finds himself travelling on an iceberg to a rainforest where the other animals are dubious about him and are quite unkind, until they get to know him and the difficulties he is facing.
Second half of the Summer term – Our topic is called ‘Who lives there?’ and is based around castles. We base a lot of our learning on the text ‘The boy who grew dragons’ but also use supplementary texts such as ‘The egg’ and ‘The Journey’ We share stores and write fact files. We will hopefully also get to visit a real Castle!
Each half term we focus on developing our art skills based on investigating the work of famous artists, develop our own personal opinions of different arts and take part in discussions about what we like or dislike about pieces, before then planning and developing our own art in the style of a given artist.