Welcome to Cygnus
Year 2
September 2019
Miss J.A. Oddy - Class Teacher
Mrs Wiles - Teaching Tuesday
Miss Fallon - Learning Support Assistant
Mrs Stephenson - Learning Support Assistant
We hope you all have a lovely Summer holiday. We are looking forward to working with you and your child and we are all looking forward to a busy academic year with lots of enjoyable learning opportunities which will help your child achieve their potential!
Here is some information you might find useful:
Class Volunteers
Mr T. Waites ~ Thursday (Reading)
* We would love to have more volunteers, especially to support the children with their reading, spelling and maths skills. Please come and ask if you are able to help!
Curriculum
Literacy ~ Narrative writing with a focus on the books by Julia Donaldson (our author study)
Non-narrative ~ information texts ~ Ernest Shackleton/Scott of the Antarctic and animals in Antarctica
Poetry ~ Reciting poetry to an audience ~ Hallowe’en
SPaG ~ spelling ~ common exception words and homophones.
Punctuation ~ capital letters, full stops and question marks
Grammar ~ nouns and noun phrases, verbs and adjectives
Handwriting ~ the children will spend time presenting their work in a neat, legible way. Copies of our handwriting scheme are attached so you can practice with your child at home! The children will be working towards achieving a “golden pencil” ~ their reward for achieving excellent handwriting status!
Numeracy ~ place value ~ counting and comparing to 100, tens and ones
using addition, counting in 2s, 5s, and 10s
Science ~ Animals including humans ~ habitats, healthy lifestyle and hygiene
I.C.T. ~ Following precise and ambiguous instructions (Beebots)
Geography ~ Antarctica ~ continents and oceans.
History ~ Rosa Parks, Ernest Shackleton, Captain Robert Scott
Physical Education ~ real PE and games
Art and Craft ~ painting ~ colour mixing, Kandinsky (concentric circles) sketching
Religious Education ~ ~ How do people pray?
Music ~ Harvest songs
PHSE ~ Making choices for a healthy life
We will always inform you of curriculum changes if any take place and we will be incorporating our topics into our weekly homework on Fridays.
Homework
Key Skills and Numeracy homework will be set on Friday and needs to be handed in on the following Wednesday. We would appreciate it if you could sign your child’s homework sheets/books each week. We hold a weekly raffle draw for all those children who hand in their homework on, or before Wednesday.
In the next couple of weeks, the children will receive their homework folders and a homework pack which will hopefully, help them with their homework!
Attached to the Cygnus homework sheets you will find a weekly newsletter which we hope you will find useful. In this letter, we like to celebrate the children’s achievements ~ awards, birthdays and other successes!
Reading
We believe in Cygnus, that reading is ‘the gateway to learning’ so we encourage the children to read as often as they can! The children will have four guided reading sessions a week, paired reading with Year 6 on Monday and they will do individual reading to an adult at least once every fortnight. We hope you will be able to read with your child at home, too. Comments from home can be written in their reading diaries. In school, we will be keeping individual reading records which we will share with you at parent’s evening. During their time in Year 2, the children will be filmed reading, with parental permission, so they can evaluate their own reading and see where they need to improve. It is really important that they learn how to read with fluency and speed especially when they are doing a reading test. So, we often send home ‘speed reading ‘tasks where your child can practise this skill.
We will be starting a new reading initiative on Friday mornings in the new term. We would like to invite you in to read with your child, play phonics games, develop their skills with speed reading and practice spellings. We will also be working on books from Active Learn’s Bug Club. We are hoping that by providing the children with these sessions each week it will help them all progress with their reading.
PE/ Sport
In Key Stage One we expect all the children to be in the correct P.E kit.
This consists of:
OUTDOOR ~ Tracksuit (blue), team polo shirt and trainers (essential).
INDOOR ~ shorts (blue), team polo shirt.
Cygnus’s P.E lessons are on Monday and Friday afternoons.
Please can you make sure your child has their PE kit in school every Monday morning.
In addition to our weekly PE and sport lessons, we do Wake and Shake sessions three times a week with Year 1, yoga and mindfulness and the Manston Mile, which we use as a brain break when the children need to refocus during lessons.
Water bottles
All the children need a water bottle, as they need regular drinks during P.E lessons and in class, too. The children should not have any juice in their bottles as we are a Healthy School. Please could you make sure your child’s bottle is labelled. The children need to take their bottles home every Friday, so they can have a good clean for the following week!
Pumps
Your child will also need a pair of black pumps to wear inside school.
Awards and targets
In Cygnus we are keen to reward good behaviour and hard work, so we have several reward systems to encourage the children to achieve high standards. We have a group award system, Star of the Week, team points, individual, group and class targets.
At the end of each day we choose a child to be the staff’s ‘Cygnus of the day’ and they are awarded our Cygnus cushion to sit on the following day ~ your child will let you know if they have been chosen for this treat!
Every week the children in school, are rewarded for their hard work and good behaviour by having ‘Golden Time’ ~ 20 minutes of free time on Friday afternoons.
The children will be able to explain how these systems work once they have experienced them in the Autumn Term.
Class rules
On Transition Day, the children decided on their class rules. We have also written a Class Charter which all the children have signed and agreed to ~ we will send you a copy of both these documents in our next newsletter.
We hope you have found all this information helpful. Please feel free to come and see a member of Cygnus staff if you have any questions or worries.
Cygnus’s motto is:
‘Be the best you can be, be kind to your friends and enjoy learning’
Spelling
Just to keep you updated, the way we teach spellings has changed. We will now teach the children a new spelling rule each week and send these home with the children. This is a whole school approach as we have recently purchased a new spelling scheme. Therefore we won’t be having a traditional spelling test each week as we want to encourage the children to use the spellings in their writing as much as possible. Thank you for your ongoing support.
Kind Regards,
Cygnus Staff