We expect that children read, and are read to, at home daily. This should be using a combination of their reading book from school, books that they have at home and books from the library. Children will earn passport points for visiting the library and sharing the books they've loaned with their class. 

Visit the page below for guidance on reading at home with your child. 

• Revising the 40+ phonics sounds that children will have become familiar with in Y1. 

Children need to be able to read and write these sounds. To write, the adult might say 'can you write the 'ay' sound?' As there's more than one way to write this sound (ay, ai, a_e, eigh, ei), the spelling can be specified with an example e.g. 'It's the 'ay' sound like in the word play'. 

Children could make a list of as many words as they can think of that follow a spelling pattern. For example, words that have the 'ea' digraph in. Therefore: tea, heat, dream, meat, neatly etc. What pattern can they notice? Where does the ea digraph appear in the word? With this sound, it's usually in the middle of the word.

Spelling: 

• Days of the week
• Months of the year
• Year 1 and 2 common exception words
• Words with the apostrophe for contraction

Handwriting: 

In year 2, handwriting is very important and is used as one of the key judgements towards a child's end of key stage results. Year 2 expectations are as follows:

• form lower-case letters correctly by starting and finishing in the correct place
• making sure letters are the correct size- clear tall, small and dangly letters
• writing clear capital letters
• using the correct sized space between words, which is the size of a letter o

Children in year 2 continue to work towards joining their handwriting.

Suggested ways to practise handwriting:

• writing individual letters
• writing diagraphs/trigraphs e.g. oo, ar, igh
• practising spellings e.g. days of the week, common exception words
• copying a few sentences from a reading book
• saying a short sentence out loud for your child to write down