Year 2 suggested teaching and learning activities.

I have pulled together a list of activities you may wish to do with your child during their time at home, based on areas of learning that still need embedding or we are yet to cover. Hope it helps.

· count in steps of 2, 3 and 5 from 0 and in 10s from any number, forwards and backwards

· Adding and subtracting two 2-digit numbers when crossing 10

· telling the time (to five minutes)

· Shape; 2D and 3D shapes – identify and describe the properties

· Statistics; interpret and construct simple pictograms, tally charts, block diagrams and tables

· Measurement; choose and use appropriate standard units to measure length/height (m/cm), mass (kg/g), temperature (⁰C) and capacity (l/ml)

Practise Y2 spellings with specific focus on contractions, suffixes and homophones. Ask the children to write sentences containing these words to ensure they fully understand the meaning of the words.

Read….lots! Books, magazines, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. There are also a number of websites where you can hear people reading aloud, too e.g. Oliver Jeffers and David Walliams to name a couple.

Children should be able to describe the lifecycle of a plant and know how they grow into mature plants from either a seed or a bulb. They should also be able to explain what seeds and plants need to grow.

Suggested ideas:

Grow your own bean plants – write a bean diary

Conduct a comparative experiment to show what a seed needs to germinate i.e. grow 3 or 4 beans in different containers and change the conditions e.g. water, light, temperature (one must be a control).

Get children to write up their experiment, thinking about the following things:

· What question am I trying to answer?

· What is my prediction?

· What equipment will I need?

· How will I carry out the experiment?

· How will I make it a fair test?

· What will I measure/observe?

· How will I record my results?

· Draw a conclusion from the results.

Repeat the above experiment with pot plants. Do plants need different conditions to seeds? If so, why? (Seeds and bulbs need water but not light, in most cases, because they have a store of food inside them).

Dissect a plant and identify its different parts and what they do.

Our next topic will be the Great Fire of London.

Suggested activities:

· Create a timeline to understand chronology. Identify when the GFoL was and compare this to other known events e.g. Gunpowder Plot, discovery of the South Pole e.t.c. Place the events in order (this is also a really good activity for embedding place value!).

· Have a look at some street maps of London. Locate the infamous ‘Pudding Lane’. See if your child can also identify other key locations/buildings nearby. Would they have been there at the time of the GFoL?

Write a recount of the GFoL; what happened and when, remembering that it should be written in chronological order. Children could draw their own memory jogger to help them sequence the events.

· Think about the reasons why the fire spread so quickly and ask children to think about whether that would happen today? If not, why not? What significant changes occurred as a result of the fire?

· Ask the children how we know so much about this event. What key pieces of evidence do we have e.g. the diary of Samuel Pepys.

· Write some sense poetry; what would people have been able to see, hear, smell, touch and taste at the time of the fire?

· Imagine looking down on the fire (birds eye view) and write a spine poem about the things that could be seen e.g. River Thames, smoke, flames, people fleeing their homes.

· Using black sugar paper and pastels, create landscape pictures of the GFoL

· Create your own ‘Pudding Lane’ by making houses using templates from Twinkl