Welcome to Willow Class
Willow class is made up of 27 children in year 2 and year 3. Miss Smith is our Teacher and Miss Nurcombe and Miss Kirkbride (Thursday) are Willow's TAs. Miss Prowse and Miss Gibbons work as 1:1 TAs.
We love and have a positive attitude to our learning and always try our best and work hard.
Our big question this term is, How do we explore?’ We will be learning what an explorer is and the lives of significant explorers- Amelia Earhart, Robert Scott, Christopher Columbus and Neil Armstrong. We will also learn about how people explore and what they need in order to do this. We will also consider if it is harder to explore in land or sea and think about if there are any parts of the world that are still undiscovered. Our big ideas this term are Environment, Similarity and Differences.
Our Science this term is Forces and magnets we will compare how things move on different surfaces , notice that some forces need contact between two objects, but magnetic forces can act at a distance, observe how magnets attract or repel, describe magnets as having two poles and predict whether two magnets will attract or repel each other, depending on which poles are facing.
English
Writing
For Writing, we use The Write Stuff scheme, I know many of you are already familiar with this. For those who are not, the lessons are split into experience days, which provide children with a stimulus for their writing followed by sentence stacking lessons where we use lens to create a vocabulary vault, which children use for their writing. The lens come from the writing rainbow which has a Fantastic tier (feeling, asking, noticing, touch, action, smell, taste, imagining and checking for sounds), a Grammeristic tier (grammar devices such as punctuation, adjectives, nouns, tense etc) and a Boomtastic tier which includes other devices we can use in our writing i.e. onomatopoeia, repetition etc. We do not use all lens every lesson (6 at the most). Once we have done all the sentence stacking lessons children do an independent piece of writing.
Our first unit is a narrative based on the book 'The secret of Black Rock'. Our second unit is a non-chronological report based on Pirates. Our final unit is a non-fiction unit based on Neil Armstrong.
Reading
In Reading, children who have not completed the Read, Write Inc (RWI) programme will continue to have daily lessons, which will consist of speed sounds, reading, spelling words using Fred fingers and hold a sentence. Children will then read a RWI story which will involve learning story green words from the book and red words (these are tricky words that cannot be sounded out) and speedy green words. Children will work with partners to take it in turns to read the story and on the final day will have questions to answer about what they have read. This year we will be teaching RWI in sole colour groups across KS1 (Ash and Willow) i.e. a pink group, a blue group etc.
All children will be doing whole class reading for a whole hour twice a week. Each lesson we will all have the same text and will be focusing on one of the six comprehension skills - making sense of what has been read, activating prior knowledge (what we already know that may help us to understand the text), word consciousness (understanding new vocabulary and meanings), predicting (what might happen based on what we already know or have read so far), summarising (main ideas from a paragraph/sequencing the story) and visualising (using pictures with new vocab or using illustrations from the story to gain meaning about the text). We will also focus on our reading fluency by listening to modelled reading by me (Miss Smith), choral reading (reading together as a class), echo reading and paired reading. The text we are reading this term is 'The Snail and the Whale'.
Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation (SPAG)
We are following the Spelling Shed scheme. Children who have finished RWI scheme will have daily SPAG lessons with 20 mins focusing on spelling and handwriting and 20 mins focusing on grammar and punctuation.
Maths
In Maths our units this term are Shape and Multiplication and Division
Year 2
Geometry: properties of shapes
- identify and describe the properties of 2-D shapes, including the number of sides, and line symmetry in a vertical line
- identify and describe the properties of 3-D shapes, including the number of edges, vertices and faces
- identify 2-D shapes on the surface of 3-D shapes, [for example, a circle on a cylinder and a triangle on a pyramid]
- compare and sort common 2-D and 3-D shapes and everyday objects
Number: multiplication and division
- recall and use multiplication and division facts for the 2, 5 and 10 multiplication tables, including recognising odd and even numbers
- calculate mathematical statements for multiplication and division within the multiplication tables and write them using the multiplication (×), division (÷) and equals (=) signs
- show that multiplication of 2 numbers can be done in any order (commutative) and division of 1 number by another cannot
- solve problems involving multiplication and division, using materials, arrays, repeated addition, mental methods, and multiplication and division facts, including problems in contexts
Year 3-
Geometry: properties of shapes
- draw 2-D shapes and make
- recognise angles as a property of shape or a description of a turn
- identify right angles, recognise that 2 right angles make a half-turn, 3 make three-quarters of a turn and 4 a complete turn; identify whether angles are greater than or less than a right angle
- identify horizontal and vertical lines and pairs of perpendicular and parallel lines.
Number: Multiplication and Division
- recall and use multiplication and division facts for the 3, 4 and 8 multiplication tables
- write and calculate mathematical statements for multiplication and division using the multiplication tables that they know, including for two-digit numbers times one-digit numbers, using mental and progressing to formal written methods
- solve problems, including missing number problems, involving multiplication and division, including positive integer scaling problems and correspondence problems in which n objects are connected to m objects
Our PE days are on Wednesday & Friday each week. On Wednesdays I will teach REAL PE and on Friday we have Inspire coming in to work with us.
Letters
| Name | |
|---|---|
| Willow Spring term letter 2025.pdf | Download |
Our Classroom
Our Learning
Look what we have been learning!
In DT, we have been learning about mechanisms and have been designing, planning, building and decorating ferris wheels. In the first few lessons we learnt about ferris wheels and how they work (mechanism). From what we had looked at we then designed and planned how we were going to build ours and materials we could use. We then began building using a cereal box as a base and a paper plate and straw for the wheel. In the the next lessons we created the pods and decorated the wheels, before finally evaluating them. We were very pleased with the finished products.
Home Learning
If you are currently learning at home please use the links below. Make sure you do TTrockstars or topmarks everyday and also make sure you read.
Use TTrockstars to practise times tables. Also practise number bonds and fact families using Topmarks. You can also practise your spelling using Spelling Shed.
Science
English
Geography