What makes Year 2 different?

Year 2 is a milestone year in your child’s school journey. The children are coming to the end of their years in KS1 and are on the cusp of entering KS2.

Year 2 provides them with the opportunity to practise and embed everything they have learnt so far, whilst allowing them to explore a new practical, creative curriculum. They then discover a variety of skills and strategies which helps them to apply and secure new knowledge in a wider range of areas.

Our biggest focus is building your child’s confidence, and developing that all important independence for learning, all while providing fun, engaging and motivating lessons for our young learners. As staff, we pride ourselves on making Year 2 a year to remember!

Writing in Year 2

Our English curriculum exposes the children to a range of high-quality books through reading, role play and writing. The English is carefully planned so that the children can explore the book, respond to it in a variety of ways and gradually build up to a big writing outcome at the end. The books help us to explore a range of written outcomes such as narratives, letters, diaries, instructions and non-fiction writing. Using a book as a stimulus means that the children are highly engaged and motivated to write, as well as being supported by the text and/or pictures too. It also provides the children with a range of rich, adventurous vocabulary that they can use in their own writing as well.

In Year 2, the children will continue to practise the key writing skills they were developing in Year 1. This includes using full stops and capital letters, writing in Kinetic Letters, using spaces between words, using the conjunction ‘and’ to join two sentences together and using phonics to make plausible attempts at spelling.

The main spelling, punctuation and grammar skills that will be taught and consolidated this year include:

- using conjunctions more regularly

- apostrophes for possession and contraction

- commas to separate items in a list

- expanded noun phrases for description

- four different types of sentences: statement, command, question and exclamation

Reading in Year 2

Reading is such an important skill and the effect it has on child development, learning and progress is vastly proven through research. In Year 2, children continue to develop their love of reading through being exposed to a wide range of books, including fiction, picture books, non-fiction, poetry and e-books. These are all read for pleasure, as well as learning, as our aim is to foster enthusiastic, passionate readers for life.

Reading happens every day in Year 2 and this gives the children the opportunity to hone in on their phonics skills that they learnt in Early Years and Year 1. We continue to practise decoding, prosody (expression) and fluency, developing the children’s vocabulary and knowledge of reading.  As more children complete the phonics scheme, focus begins to shift more directly to comprehension skills where strategies for retrieval and inference are taught. We encourage and build on the children’s stamina for longer reading and promote the importance of self-checking words to ensure the meaning of the text is clear.