Autumn Dear Parents, 

Welcome to what I hope will be a successful term for your child in Class 2. It is a real pleasure to have the opportunity to teach your children and I hope we will have a great year together.  

Mrs Rookes and I firmly believe that children learn best when they are happy. With this in mind if you or they have any problems at all please let one of us know so that we can hopefully deal with small problems before they have a chance to become big ones. 

We will of course be covering all of the subjects of the National Curriculum this term and adopting a cross-curricular approach whenever possible. In R.E. schools in our diocese are trialling a new scheme of work. The focus of this topic is ourselves as part of a family and what it means to belong to different groups or families which include our homes, our school, our churches and our local community.  The topics in Education for Personal Relationships will be New Beginnings and Good to be Me focussing on belonging, self-awareness, managing feelings, understanding others’ feelings and making choices.  

In Literacy we will continue to build on the reading and writing skills already learned, developing independent writing, extending use of grammar and continuing to work on handwriting skills. The children will be working on applying their existing knowledge of letters and sounds and extending this during the daily phonics lesson, taking every opportunity to practise their word building skills. They will also have in their folders a copy of the key words that they should be able to read and spell in the course of the year. The test of whether the children retain and understand these new words is whether they can use and adapt the knowledge when writing in class. The children will continue to bring home reading books each day. I know it is difficult and we all lead busy lives but it does make a real difference if the children have the opportunity to enjoy and share their books with their parents. Even when a child can apparently ‘read’ there is still a range of skills still to be developed. Additional homework in either maths or English will be set each Thursday to be returned on Monday. 

In Numeracy we will continue to work on RM maths in the ICT suite each day and to cover during our daily maths lesson: 

i)                   Number - reading, writing and ordering numbers to 100 and then 1000, tens and units place value, simple fractions, addition and subtraction to 20 mentally, repeated addition and early multiplication.

ii)                 Shape, Space and Measures – recognizing hexagons, pentagons, cubes, cuboids, cylinders and spheres and describing them in terms of vertices, sides/edges and faces; recognizing right-angled corners in 2D and 3D shapes; understanding rotation of angle; turning through right angles ¼, ½ and whole turns; recognizing different types of movement including translation, rotation and reflection. 

In History our topic is famous people. We will be looking at King William 1 and covering such areas as the Battle of Hastings, the Domesday Book, the Bayeux Tapestry and Mediaeval life and living in a castle.  

In Science we will be studying ‘Materials and how they change’ and ‘Variation’ in animals, plants and humans. In Art and Design we will be designing and making fridge magnets, making our own version of the Bayeux Tapestry, painting and drawing from pictures taken with the digital camera, looking at a range of buildings and recording them using a variety of media. In ICT we will continue to develop keyboard and control skills. 

Mrs Jepps and Mrs Little will continue to teach Music and P.E. to the whole class on Wednesday afternoons. 

A few practical requests! Please ensure that your children’s clothing is clearly marked and I would prefer that the children do not bring toys to school. We have invested in a wide range of play equipment so the children are very well catered for during break times.  

I hope we will all have a very good term. Please do not hesitate to contact either of us if you have any queries at all.    

Mrs. C. Doyle.                                                      Mrs. C. Rookes.

Class Teacher.                                                    Teaching Assistant.