Livingstone Primary School

Welcome to the Swifts class web page. 

Mrs Isley, Mrs Davis and Ms Rowe hope you all had a relaxing Summer break and are looking forward to lots of new learning experiences during the Autumn Term in Swifts class.

Summer Term 2

English 

In English we are going to be focusing on stories by the same author, Julia Donaldson. We are first going to read The Highway Rat, a fantastic story about a rat stealing food from all of the travellers. This story is going to help us when we learn about a famous highwayman from Bedford in history. We are also going to read A Squash and a Squeeze – the first children’s book Julia Donaldson published! During our exciting English lessons, we are going to focus on our reading comprehension and inferencing skills, how we can make our sentences even better by using a range of punctuation, exciting adjectives and conjunctions to extend our sentences.

Spellings

Please find your spellings for this half term below, printed sheets will be given each Friday. Please practice your spellings daily using cursive handwriting.

Maths

Place Value

During this half term, we are going to be focusing on place value where we are going to learn all about numbers, their value and what each number represents.  We will learn how to count forwards and backwards within 100, partition numbers into tens and ones, order and compare numbers using the more than and less than symbols (<>) and count in 1s, 2s, 5s, 10s and 3s.

The videos linked below can help you with your maths learning.

Week 1

https://whiterosemaths.com/homelearning/year-2/week-1/

Week 2

https://whiterosemaths.com/homelearning/year-2/week-2/

Week 3

https://whiterosemaths.com/homelearning/year-2/week-3/

Week 4

https://whiterosemaths.com/homelearning/year-2/week-4/

The document below explains how we will teach the children how to add, subtract, multiply and divide so you can support your child at home.

Here is a link to interactive maths manipulatives that we use in class, for you to use at home: https://www.didax.com/math/virtual-manipulatives.html

Here is a link to another great website that has interactive maths manipulatives to support you at home: https://mathsbot.com/manipulativeMenu

Please practise your number bonds to 10, 20 and 100 daily. Activity sheets can be found below:

Please also practise your 2, 5, 10 and 3 times tables every day. 

https://www.timestables.co.uk/ is a great website filled with lots of fun times tables games!

Activity sheets can be found below:

History and Geography

This term, our topic is 'Out and About’. We are going to learn all about our local area in Bedford, the Black Tom Area. In history, we are going to learn about who the area is named after (a highwayman!) and compare our local area in the past to today using photographs. In Geography, we are going to focus on maps and we are going to create our own simple map using a key of this area and we are going to observe aerial photographs of Bedford.

We are also going to look at transport and think about how transport has changed over time. We are also going to learn about some significant people, such as The Wright Brothers who invented the aeroplane, Garett Morgan who invented the traffic light and Karl Benz who invented the petrol motor car.

Black History Month

October is a really special month because it is Black History Month where we learn about the history of back people. In Year 2, we strive to learn about black history throughout the year across all topics, but we also ensure it is celebrated in October too. We are going to learn about Mary Seacole, a famous nurse who nursed sick soldiers to health in the Crimean War. We are going to compare her to Florence Nightingale, who we learned about in Year 1, to understand the challenges that Mary faced.

Science

During the Autumn Term, we are going to focus on the topic Living Things and their Habitats. We are going to learn about what a habitat is and we are going to focus on different habitats found around the world such as the rainforest, desert, oceans and the Arctic. We are going to learn about the animals we can find in these habitats and how they are suited to living there, such as a polar bear can live in the cold Arctic because it has thick fur. We are also going to learn about microhabitats and we are going to look at these around our school.