🌸 Year 2 - A Very Warm Welcome! 🌸

Dear Poppies and Violets families,

A huge and very heartfelt welcome to Year 2! 💜🌺

We hope you have all had a wonderful summer and are feeling ready for the exciting year ahead. Miss Dee and Mrs Shorten are so looking forward to welcoming the children into Poppies and Violets and beginning what we know will be a really happy, joyful and learning-filled year together.

We have so many wonderful things planned for the year ahead and cannot wait to get to know the children, discover all the things that make them brilliant and unique, and watch them learn, grow and flourish throughout Year 2.

💛 Happy Hearts and Minds

Our first two days together, Thursday 3rd and Friday 4th September, will be our Zones Happy Hearts and Minds days.

These are two really special days where our priority is simply helping the children to feel happy, safe, settled and at home in their new classrooms before we launch into our usual lessons and learning.

We will spend lots of time getting to know one another as a class, exploring our new classrooms and finding out where everything belongs. We will gently introduce and practise our everyday classroom routines so that the children can begin Year 2 feeling confident about what to do and where to go.

We will also show the children what they can do if they are ever feeling worried or have something they would like to tell us, including introducing our ‘I Have Something to Say’ box. We will revisit our Zones of Regulation toolkit, helping the children to recognise and communicate how they are feeling and reminding them of the different strategies they can use to help manage those feelings.

Most importantly, these first two days give us the opportunity to ease everyone back into school life with plenty of gentleness, warmth and care. 🥰

📚 Reading at Home

Reading regularly at home makes such a wonderful difference to children's confidence and progress, and we really appreciate your support with this.

We aim to change the children's reading books at least once each week and, wherever possible, more frequently than this. Sharing their school reading book together at home, talking about what they have read and enjoying books together will all be enormously valuable throughout Year 2.

✏️ Friday Spellings

Friday mornings will be our spelling time in Year 2.

Each Friday, the children will have a spelling lesson in which we teach and explore their new spelling rule or pattern. They will be taught their new spellings to practise at home, and we will post the week's spelling list online each Friday afternoon, so that you can easily see what they are working on.

The children then have the week to practise these spellings at home before being tested on them the following Friday. On that Friday, they will complete their spelling test and then learn and receive their next set of spellings, ready for the cycle to begin again.

As Friday 4th September is only our second day together, there will not be a spelling test that morning. Instead, we will give the children their first set of Year 2 spellings to begin practising at home. Their first spelling test will then take place on Friday 11th September.

🏃 PE

Our regular PE lesson will take place every Friday afternoon, beginning on Friday 11th September.

There will not be PE on Friday 4th September, as this forms part of our Happy Hearts and Minds days. Our usual Friday afternoon PE routine will therefore begin the following week.

🧥 A Little September Reminder

Please could everything that comes into school be clearly named. This includes uniform, jumpers, coats, shoes, bags, pencil cases, lunch boxes, water bottles and any other belongings. With two busy Year 2 classes, having names on everything makes an enormous difference when something inevitably decides to wander away from its owner! 😊

September weather can also be rather unpredictable, so please make sure the children come to school each day with warm layers, such as a jumper, and something waterproof, such as a coat. Even if the morning begins beautifully sunny, it is always worth sending them in — just in case the Great British weather has other ideas! ☀️🌧️

🏰 Hedingham Castle

We also have our wonderful Year 2 trip to Hedingham Castle on Tuesday 29th September to look forward to!

It promises to be a really special, autumnal day out and a fantastic opportunity to bring some of our learning to life. 🍂🏰

If you haven't already done so, please remember to respond to the trip note to confirm that you would like your child to attend and pay any outstanding monies.

If you would be happy to join us as a parent volunteer, please also sign up to let us know — we are always very grateful for your support on our trips.

We really cannot wait to welcome our new Poppies and Violets through the doors on Thursday morning and begin our Year 2 adventure together.

There is so much to look forward to: new learning, wonderful books, exciting discoveries, creativity, friendships, trips, challenges, celebrations and lots and lots of opportunities to grow.

Above all, we hope to create classrooms in which every child feels happy, safe, loved, valued and excited to learn.

Here's to a wonderful year of happy hearts, curious minds and lots of lovely memories along the way. 🌸💜

We can't wait to see you all!

With love,Miss Dee & Mrs Shorten 🌷