Dear Parents,

Welcome back to our final term in Class 2. Your children continue to be a joy to teach and I look forward to another term in their company.

This term we are pleased to welcome Miss Korina Livermore, a student from Exeter University, who will be with us until July completing her final teaching practice.

As I have said before 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 Mrs Wilson, Miss Livermore or myself 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 while trying to adopt a more cross curricular approach whenever possible. Our topics in Religious Education for this term are Easter. In Education for Personal Relationships we will be looking at Relationships and Changes.

In Literacy we will build on the reading and writing skills already learned, developing independent writing, extending use of grammar and continuing to work on handwriting skills. We will be following units of work in Literacy covering poetry, narrative and non-fiction forms of writing. Our spelling focuses will be prefixes, suffixes and compound words. 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.

In Numeracy we will continue to consolidate previous work and will then cover 

1. Number - reading, writing and ordering numbers to 100 and then 1000, tens and units place value and addition and subtraction, simple fractions, addition and subtraction to 20 mentally, repeated addition and early multiplication and division. We will be concentrating on knowledge of number bonds to 20 with ‘rapid recall’ and will begin to learn the 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10 times tables.
2. 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.

We will be taking a topic-based, cross-curricular approach to our work in the afternoons. Throughout the topic, The Seaside, we will study Geography, History, Art, Literacy and some aspects of Science. As part of the topic we will be making regular trips to the beach to find out more about the world in which we live.

In addition to the areas of Science covered in our topic we will also be looking at ‘Forces’ and ‘Electricity’. In ICT we will continue to develop keyboard and control skills, finding information and controlling a floor turtle.

We are also planning a whole day trip to Totnes Castle as a follow-up to our Norman Conquest topic which proved so popular in the Autumn Term. Details to follow.

Again a few practical requests! Please ensure that your children’s clothing is clearly marked and encourage your child to take full responsibility for their belongings. It is school policy not to 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 any of us if you have any queries at all.

Mrs C Doyle.                         Miss K Livermore                         Mrs C Rookes