Important update from TheSchoolRun
For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.
What this means for subscribers:
- Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
- In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
- As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.
A few changes to be aware of:
- The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
- The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.
If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.
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Spelling in Year 2
Spelling in Year 2
In Year 2, children take a more in-depth look at the phonic rules and patterns of different words. For example, they may look at one particular sound and then see how it is represented in different words.
Can you see which sound the following four words have in common?
In these four words, the same sound is made by a different group of letters: 'dge', 'g', 'ge' and 'j'.
To make this clear to children, teachers may give them various words to look at and ask them to underline the recurring sound. They may be given ten or more words and asked to group them according to their spelling patterns (so 'hedge' would be grouped with 'badge', 'gem' with 'giant', 'village' with 'charge' and 'join' with 'jet').
Year 2 spelling patterns
In their weekly spelling lists, children will cover various spelling patterns, including the following:
- Silent letters k, g and w (as in 'knock', 'gnat' and 'write')
- Words ending le, el, al and il (as in 'meddle', 'tunnel', 'animal', 'pencil')
- Verbs ending y which then changes to ies and ied (as in 'copy', 'copies' and 'copied')
- Dropping the e off the end of a word when adding -ing, -ed, -er (as in 'hiking', 'hiked' and 'hiker')
- Words which need a consonant to be doubled before adding -ing, -ed (as in 'pat', 'patting', 'patted')
- Unusual uses of vowels, such as 'o' being used for the 'u' sound ('other') and 'a' being used for the 'o' sound ('warm')
- Words containing suffixes (groups of letters added to the end of a word) including -ly, -ment, -ful, -ness and -less
- Words where apostrophes are used to show contractions, such as: 'do not' changing to 'don't'
- Words ending -tion such as ('fiction')
- Homophones, which are pairs of words that sound the same, but are spelt differently (such as: 'hear' and 'here')
Year 2 exception words
Children will also learn another group of common exception words (or tricky words). These are words commonly found in the English language, but which do not follow the phonic rules that have been taught so far. Examples of these in Year 2 are: 'sugar' and 'boxer'.
How spelling is taught in Year 2
Teachers will give children lists of spellings to learn at home, but will also need to provide various activities for them to do at school. They may be given their spelling words to do as handwriting practice. They may also be given worksheets in which certain words are missing and need to be filled in, given the context of a sentence. Children may be given cards to match up (for example, root words and suffixes).
Preparing for the weekly spelling test also becomes a permanent homework task for most Y2 children.
Year 2 spelling worksheets
Look through our selection of Y2 spelling worksheets to find activities to help your child practise the Y2 spelling patterns they're learning, or download our Y2 spelling tests pack for ten lists of words and a final-year test.
How spelling is taught in primary school, year by year
Find out what words and spelling patterns children are taught in each year of primary school with our parents' guides:
