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 Lovell and Miss Kirkbride 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 live?’ Our big ideas this term are- Life, Relationships, Habitat and Environment. The mini enquiry questions that we will be answering are- What does it mean to be alive? What is a home? What is a habitat? How do you keep healthy? Who eats who?
Our History focus this term is the Anglo-Saxons. We will learn about why and where the Anglo Saxons invaded United Kingdom, where they choose to settle, what village life was like for an Anglo Saxon, Anglo Saxon Gods and what they believed. We will also look at Anglo Saxon artefacts and what we can tell for certain or what we can deduce from them.
Our Geography this term is will focus on physical and human features of our local area. We will also use our fieldwork and observational skills to look at our school grounds and local environment.
Our first Science topic will be Living things and habitats we will learn about what it means to be alive (life processes), identify things that are living, dead or never alive and the differences between these. We will learn about different habitats and how animals are suited to or have adapted to their habitat and how the habitat provides for their basic needs. We will also learn about food chains and how plants and animals depend on each other. Linking to this, our second science topic is Animals including humans and we will learn about basic needs of all animals and what we need in order to keep us healthy- different types of food, hygiene and exercise.
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 'Wolves in walls'. Our second unit is instruction writing- How to make a bird feeder. Our final unit is a non-chronological report about Habitats.
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 'Stig of the Dump'.
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 Fractions, Time, Money and Mass, Capacity and Temperature.
Year 2
Fractions
- recognise, find, name and write fractions 1/2 ,1/4 , 1/3 and 3/4 of a length, shape, set of objects or quantity.
- write simple fractions, for example 1/2 of 6 = 3
- Recognise the equivalence of 1/2 and 2/4.
Time
- compare and sequence intervals of time
- tell and write the time to five minutes, including quarter past/to the hour and draw the hands on a clock face to show these times
- know the number of minutes in an hour and the number of hours in a day.
Money
- recognise and use symbols for pounds (£) and pence (p); combine amounts to make a particular value
- find different combinations of coins that equal the same amounts of money
- solve simple problems in a practical context involving addition and subtraction of money of the same unit, including giving change
Mass, Capacity and Temperature
- choose and use appropriate standard units to estimate and measure length/height in any direction (m/cm); mass (kg/g); temperature (°C); capacity (litres/ml) to the nearest appropriate unit, using rulers, scales, thermometers and measuring vessels.
Year 3-
Fractions
- count up and down in tenths; recognise that tenths arise from dividing an object into 10 equal parts and in dividing one-digit numbers or quantities by 10
- recognise, find and write fractions of a discrete set of objects: unit fractions and non-unit fractions with small denominators
- recognise and use fractions as numbers: unit fractions and non-unit fractions with small denominators
- recognise and show, using diagrams, equivalent fractions with small denominators
- add and subtract fractions with the same denominator within one whole [for example, 1/7 +4/7 =5/7 6/7-2/7=4/7 ]
- compare and order unit fractions, and fractions with the same denominators
- solve problems that involve all of the above
Time
- tell and write the time from an analogue clock, including using Roman numerals from I to XII, and 12-hour and 24-hour clocks
- estimate and read time with increasing accuracy to the nearest minute; record and compare time in terms of seconds, minutes and hours; use vocabulary such as o’clock, am/pm, morning, afternoon, noon and midnight
- know the number of seconds in a minute and the number of days in each month, year and leap year
- compare durations of events [for example, to calculate the time taken by particular events or tasks
Money
- add and subtract amounts of money to give change, using both £ and p in practical contexts
Mass, Capacity and Temperature
- Measure, compare, add and subtract lengths (m/cm/mm), mass (kg/g) volume/ capacity (l/ml)
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
Our Classroom
| Name | |
|---|---|
| Willow Term 5 and 6 letter 2025.docx | Download |
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
History