St Monica's Catholic Primary School

Curriculum Information

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To see an overview of the curriculum for Year 2, please click on the link below.

A meeting for Year 1 and Year 2 parents is held every January to explain how we teach reading and writing.

Helpful hints for teaching literacy at home can be found here:

The children learn that there are lots of ways to spell different sounds. See the sheet below which is taken from Ruth Miskin’s Read, Write Inc Scheme (RWI). For example “i” could by ie (as in tie), y (my), igh (high) or i-e (kite)!

The children learn that some combinations of letters look the same but can sound different (eg the double o sound could be in “look” and also in “spoon”). Whilst other sounds look different but sound the same (eg meet and meat)! It can be very tricky and we use lots of repetition to help the children to remember. See the link below for word families i.e. groups of words with the same spelling/sound.

Children start learning “sight words” from Reception i.e. those words that cannot be sounded out using phonics – for example words such as “said”, “the”, “they”, “what”. In RWI we call these ‘red words’.

We expect children to be able to read and spell these words by the end of Year 2.

Spelling is tricky! Have a read of this poem.

The children learn to write using a cursive script. The style we use can be found here.

Learning to read isn’t just about finding out how to read the words. It is essential that children understand what they are reading about. This is called reading comprehension. See the link below for ideas you can use to develop your child’s comprehension.

See the bookmark which shows the different reading skills and questions you can ask your child at home.

We use a colour book banded system to help children progress with their reading after they have finished the RWI scheme. Children are assessed using the PM Benchmark assessment scheme. The expectation is that the children reach gold or white band by the end of Year 2.

There is an expected standard of writing for the child to reach at the end of the year. See the link