Elm Class

Welcome to Elm Class!

Welcome back! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas break! With exciting opportunities, and fun learning adventures ahead, we are all set to grow and thrive once again. Let’s embrace this journey together as one family, supporting each other every step of the way.

Here’s to another amazing half term filled with discovery and lots of fun!

Important Information:

PE sessions are scheduled for Thursday and Friday afternoons. All children are expected to arrive at school dressed in their PE kits on these days. Kindly ensure that your child is wearing the correct kit. PE kit, which can be viewed here.

Spellings will be tested on a Monday. The children will be tested on the Year 1 and 2 common exception words (below). These are the spellings that your child is expected to know by the end of the year. However, additional words may appear in the weekly spellings to aid the learning of spelling rules. Spellings will be tested at random so please practise them all throughout the year and we will be able to see the progress!

Reading is extremely important and serves as a doorway to the rest of the curriculum. Your child will receive either a phonics reading book or a colour band book to bring home to practise. Please attempt to read for at least 10 minutes a day with your child and encourage any other opportunities for reading for pleasure.

Come back to our class page regularly for updates.

In English…

This half term in English, we are diving into the fantastic book ‘The Magic Finger’ by Roald Dahl. The children will be learning how to write in the past tense and further develop their descriptive writing. During this term the children will be working on using conjunctions to develop their sentence structure.

In Maths…

This half term in Maths we will be consolidating our addition and subtraction learning.

Year 1 children will be using +, – and = symbols and creating fact families.

Year 2 children will be applying their knowledge of tens/ones and learning how to answer 2 digit addition and subtraction number problems using the column method.

Both Year 1 and 2 children will then move on to studying 2D and 3D shapes.

The children will continue to practise their 2s, 5s and 10s times tables daily.

In Science…

This half term in Science, we will be learning about the unit “Animals Including Humans”.

In RE…

The children will explore the questions: “Who is Jewish and how do they live?”.

Within this unit, pupils will learn about Jewish worldviews and ways of life. They will learn about texts from the
Torah and their importance for Jewish people today. They will find out about the mezuzah and the Shema prayer and what they mean for believers. Later in the unit, pupils will find out about Shabbat and Chanukah, discussing
why Jewish people mark these times, what they learn
from stories found in the Torah and why they are
important today.

In Geography…

This term in Geography, we will be studying the unit, ‘Would you rather live in a hot or cold place?’

In this unit, the children will learn the names and locations of the seven continents on a world map. They will learn how to locate the North and the South Poles on a world map. They will be able to describe some similarities and differences between the UK and Kenya. They will be investigating the weather and writing about it using key vocabulary and explaining whether they live in a hot or cold place.