Year 2 content

Spoken Language

At the end of the year most children should:

• Listen and respond appropriately to adults and their peers
• Ask relevant questions to extend their understanding
• Justify answers and opinions
• Gain the interest of the listener
• Maintain attention and participate actively in collaborative conversations
• Begin to be aware of the need to use more formal vocabulary and tone of voice in some situations
• Develop an increasing awareness of standard English

Phonics

At the end of the year most children should:

• Apply their phonic knowledge to blending (reading) and segmenting (spelling) sounds
• Be aware of and recognise alternative graphemes and phonemes
• Add prefixes and suffixes to spell longer words (eg  –ed, -ing, -ment, -ness, -ful and –less
• Recognise the different ways of making plurals (eg –s, -es, -ies)
• Use contractions with an apostrophe (eg can’t)
• Use the possessive apostrophe (eg the girl’s)
• Know the difference in meaning between homophones (eg there/their/they’re)
• Read and spell compound words

Reading

Word reading – the use of phonics and other strategies to decode unfamiliar words

Comprehension – the understanding of the text, increases pupils' understanding vocabulary, broadens their knowledge and understanding of themselves and the world, fosters a love of reading,

Word reading

At the end of the year most children should:

• Make use of intonation, expression and punctuation to enhance reading
• Read with appropriate phrasing taking account of an increasing range of punctuation
• Appropriately apply a range of strategies to enable accurate silent reading

Some children could:

• Read with confidence and fluency for different purposes
• Sustain silent reading for longer periods

Comprehension

At the end of the year most children should:

• Check that the text makes sense and correct inaccuracies as they read
• Summarise key points or events using direct reference from a text
• Be able to draw inferences
• Predict what might happen from details stated and implied
• Discuss words and phrases that capture the reader's interest and imagination
• Locate, retrieve and record information from non-fiction texts

Through listening to stories, poems and other texts most children should:

• Participate in discussions, taking turns and listening to others
• Recognise simple recurring literary language in stories and poetry
• Ask appropriate questions and explain clearly their understanding

Children are encouraged to develop pleasure and motivation to read by:

• Listening to and discussing a wide range of poems and stories at a level beyond that which they can read independently
• Becoming familiar with key stories and traditional tales
• Learning by heart rhymes and poems and recite these with appropriate intonation to make meaning clearer

Writing

Transcription (handwriting and spelling)

At the end of the year most children should:

• Add suffixes to regular verbs (eg –ing  -ed)
• Spell accurately many common exception words as defined in the National Curriculum 2014
• Use phonic understanding with increasing accuracy to spell unknown words
• Use a consistently joined and legible style of handwriting
• Be aware of the correct size and orientation of capital letters, lower case and digits
• Use spacing between words that reflects the size of the letters

Composition (articulating and structuring ideas)

At the end of the year most children should:

• Plan what they are going to write by writing down ideas and/ or key words, including new vocabulary
• Use appropriate features for the chosen form of writing
• Structure their writing logically e.g. use paragraphs, linking ideas together
• Begin to proofread, edit and assess their writing with a teacher or their peers

Some children could:

• Develop a more fluent style that is more organised, imaginative and clear
• Proof read and edit their writing effectively and independently

Composition (vocabulary, grammar and punctuation)

• Demarcate most sentences accurately with a capital letter and full stop, exclamation or question mark
• Use both familiar and new punctuation correctly (full stops, capital letters, exclamation marks, question marks, commas in lists and apostrophes for contracted forms and for possession)
• Write sentences in different forms, statement, question, exclamation and command
• Expand noun sentences to describe (eg the blue butterfly)
• Accurately maintain present and past tenses
• Use co-ordination (eg and, or, but)
• Use subordination (eg when, if, that)
• Use descriptive words and phrases
• Use simple time connectives