St Margaret Clitherow Catholic Primary School
We act with love, build our faith and grow as people
Year 2
Meet the Teacher information
Year 2 Long-term Curriculum
Recommended Reads
Lit in Colour
Recommended book list of books by authors of colour
Penguin Books and Lit in Colour state that:
Books create belonging. They help us see each other and understand one another. They shine a light on the world.
It’s vital that the books we read in our formative years reflect the rich diversity of the society we live in.
Here at St. Margaret Clitherow, we have a diverse school community - 55.7% of our school children are from a minority ethnic background. We therefore think it is important that children have access to books that reflect who they are. Attached is a list of recommended reads put together by Penguin Books. You can read the research behind the inclusion of books by authors of colour here:https:// https://www.penguin.co.uk/lit-in-colour/parents-and-supporters
Newsletter 17.10.25
During maths, the children have been learning all about addition and subtraction. We have been using partitioning, number bonds, fact families, base 10 and number lines to help us. Over the last few weeks, it has been fantastic seeing how excited and engaged the children have been in our weekly Numbots awards ceremony. This app helps them to secure all the
foundational knowledge of maths based around numbers, their place value and number bonds. Building automaticity around been these skills means that children can more easily and confidently understand maths and solve problems, so being able to do this in a game that is fun and engaging is really great. Children also receive 2 Marvellous Me points for achieving their weekly target of 30 minutes practice, or 1 if they have completed at least half of that.
We have finished our unit on ‘The Place Value of Punctuation and Grammar’ in English and have now moved on to nonchronological reports with minibeasts as our focus. We are loving the link to our science unit of ‘Living Things and their Habitats’ and will be using our learned knowledge here to inform our writing. In RE, we have moved on to our new unit of Catholic Social Teaching, where the children have thought about ‘light’ and ‘dark’, using their thoughts and feelings to discuss what it means that Jesus is the light of the world. They enjoyed acting ‘The Feeding of the 5000’ and reflecting on how this parable shows Jesus as the light of the world. In DT, the children have been developing their sewing skills, practising how to use running stitch and cross stitch and will be beginning to use these skills to stitch their own bug design bookmark, which is very exciting. In history, we have continued learning about technology over the last 60 years. The class were fascinated by some of the old technology, including the dial telephone and couldn’t quite believe that there were only 3 TV channels when Mrs de Grande was their age! This
week, we have learned about a famous inventor, Tim Berners Lee, who brought us the world
wide web and has had such a tremendous impact on the technology we use and how we
use it. The children have continued learning all about ‘Living Things and their Habitats’ in science. Last week, the children had a fantastic time using their observation and data recording skills to identify what conditions woodlice prefer for their microhabitats.
Newsletter 26.09.25
We have had a fantastic start to Year 2- what a wonderful bunch we have! The children have already learned so much. In English, we have been learning about a variety of grammar and punctuation. On Monday, the children enjoyed reading out their sentences and placing them into the correct hula hoop to differentiate between action, ’to be’ and ‘to have’ verbs. Later in the week, we moved on to identifying subject within a sentence where the children worked brilliantly together to match the picture with the correct subject.
We have started our RE learning journey with our mission statement and exploring our class saint, Saint Valentine. We have now moved on to our Creation unit, where the children have enjoyed exploring, describing, sequencing, acting and retelling Noah’s Ark and the story of Jonah.
In science, Year 2 are enjoying learning about living things and their habitats and have had lots of fun finding microhabitats around the school and researching larger habitats around the world.
We have been learning all about place value in maths and are currently focusing on counting in our 2s, 3s, 5s and 10s. We have also danced and sung to help us learn these facts using a range of brain break activities on BBC Supermovers, which the children loved and can be done at home too to reinforce the learning.
In history, we have been focusing on changes in technology, where this week we have been thinking about how technology has changed the way we talk to each other. The children were fascinated to learn about the old dial style landline telephones and telephone boxes.
Finally, in DT we have begun designing our bug bookmarks and learning how to create something that looks both attractive and has a purpose. We have learned how to thread a needle and are all geared up to learn how to use running and cross stitch, before completing our designs. They look amazing!
