The Huntspill Primary Academies

Welcome to Willow Class

Willow class is made up of 29 children in year 2 and year 3. Miss Smith is our Teacher and Miss Nurcombe is our TA. Miss Prowse/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.

This term our big question is Who settled here first? We will be learning about Stone Age to Iron Age- when this period was, what it was like to live during this period, how people survived, what they ate, tools they used etc. Our Geography will involve learning about physical (cliffs, woodland etc) and human features (houses, town etc). Linking to the Stone Age we will be focusing on Cheddar Gorge and Skara Brae and looking for these features in maps of these areas including aerial maps.

Our first Science topic is rocks- types of rocks, grouping rocks, soil formation and fossils. This will be followed by Animals Including Humans where we will be learning about nutrition and skeletons and muscles.

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 Stone Age Boy. Our second unit is Skara Brae and the independent writing will be a holiday brochure.

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 once 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). The first text we are reading is 'Stone Age Boy'.

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 first unit will be Place Value we will be learning:

Year 2-

count in steps of 2, 3, and 5 from 0, and in 10s from any number, forward and backward

recognise the place value of each digit in a two-digit number (10s, 1s)
identify, represent and estimate numbers using different representations, including the number line
compare and order numbers from 0 up to 100; use <, > and = signs
read and write numbers to at least 100 in numerals and in words
use place value and number facts to solve problems

Year 3-

count from 0 in multiples of 4, 8, 50 and 100; find 10 or 100 more or less than a given number
recognise the place value of each digit in a 3-digit number (100s, 10s, 1s)
compare and order numbers up to 1,000
identify, represent and estimate numbers using different representations
read and write numbers up to 1,000 in numerals and in words
solve number problems and practical problems involving these ideas

Our PE days are on Tuesday & Thursday each week. On Tuesdays TKASA will lead a sport lesson and on Thursdays I will teach REAL PE.

Click here for Willow Class Curriculum

Our Classroom