Classes - Ash

Ash class is for children in Year 2.

We are in a classroom between the Nursery and the Juniors.  We have a chance to see the juniors walking past the room and to begin to get used to being with the older children, ready for next year when we will be juniors too.  But we are still in the Infant corner of the school and get lots of fun watching the Nursery children in their play area.

We are now in our last year in Key Stage 1 and we follow the KS1 curriculum from where we left off in Year 1.  In both Literacy and Numeracy we follow the National Strategies and our teachers planning comes from this. 

We use the Letters and Sounds programme to learn our sounds and to support us in developing our reading skills.  We all know which colour of book we are using in school to help our reading to get better.  We have group reading sessions with our teacher to help us to learn more and we are encouraged to look carefully at all the clues that are given on each page, the pictures as well as the words as these are important in helping us to understand.  We should be taking a book home every night to read at home with our families but this does not have to be ’colour’ book.  Reading should be fun!

We are learning to write too.  We have regular handwriting practice to help us to form our letters correctly.  This is very important for when we are older.  If we learn the proper way now we will be able to write faster, with good joined handwriting when we are older.  A very useful skill!  We also practise our spellings and know where in the classroom to find words we are not sure about.  We sometimes practise writing sentences so that we can make sure we use capital letters and fullstops int he right place.  We sometimes do ’free writing’ when we can write what we want - and some of us forget all about finger spaces/full stops/capital letters and spellings because it is just a lot to remember at one time!

Often when we write in class it is part of our literacy lesson and so we have a lot of support from the teacher and we are able to write in the correct genre and with the right features.  But we have to have lots of lessons at doing this before we can remember it all ourselves!  We don’t do writing homework because it is too difficult for children and parents to know what is being practised.  But if you would like to do writingat home as well as reading that is really helpful.  Things like writing shopping lists or a little diray entry or a recount of an event are good practice.

Every day we do Numeracy and that is carefully planned and delivered.  Miss Martin gives us homework in numeracy and that is usually something to get us thinking about what we will be doing next week.  She gives us a chance to think about something we may not have done for a while and then we are all ready for Monday lesson and we make more progress in the week than we would if we only started to think about it on Monday!  Homework should be fun and not stressful.  Children have got many years of homework ahead and it is important that they are not ’turned off’ at a young age as this will make it very hard to get them to do their homework when the amount increases. 

We do lots of other subjects too.  We do a ’project’ each term and this will have a subject base that is either science or history or geography.  This term it is science and our teacher has very cleverly called it ’Lets Get Cooking’ to encourage our enthusiasm.  We are learning about materials that change and how they can be changed but we are doing it through cooking as this is a way that will help us to remember better.

We are a bubbly class. We love to tell people our ideas and often get excited about our work.

Our Class Link Governor is Tony Peacey.