Year 2 Curriculum – What Your Child Learns

Moving from decoding toward understanding — retrieval, inference and the elements of a story.

Fluency and decoding
Skills: Consolidating phonics knowledge, Reading with growing fluency
Understanding a text
Skills: Retrieving information from a text, Sequencing events, Making a prediction, Making an inference, Understanding vocabulary in context, Asking questions about a text
Fiction elements
Skills: Identifying character, Identifying setting, Recognising story structure, Reading poetry
Non-fiction and comparison
Skills: Reading non-fiction texts, Comparing two texts

Building longer, more varied sentences and writing across a wider range of forms.

Sentence construction
Skills: Constructing a full sentence, Expanding a sentence with more detail
Writing for a purpose
Skills: Writing a description, Writing a narrative, Writing a recount, Writing instructions, Writing an information text, Writing a letter, Writing a poem
Editing and proofreading
Skills: Editing your own writing, Proofreading for errors

Word classes, sentence types and the first joining words.

Word classes
Skills: Identifying nouns, Identifying verbs, Identifying adjectives, Identifying adverbs, Using an expanded noun phrase
Sentence types
Skills: Writing a statement, Writing a question, Writing a command, Writing an exclamation
Joining and tense
Skills: Using subordination to join clauses, Using coordination to join clauses, Using the present tense consistently, Using the past tense consistently

Now its own strand — the marks that shape a sentence and a list.

Sentence and list punctuation
Skills: Using full stops, Using capital letters, Using question marks, Using exclamation marks, Using commas in a list, Using an apostrophe for contraction

Wider spelling patterns beyond phonics — exceptions, affixes and homophones.

Spelling patterns
Skills: Spelling common exception words, Using prefixes to spell new words, Using suffixes to spell new words, Distinguishing homophones, Spelling contractions, Spelling plurals correctly

Word relationships and the first systematic word-building.

Word relationships
Skills: Finding synonyms, Finding antonyms, Using context to work out meaning
Word building
Skills: Building a word family, Using prefixes to build new words, Using suffixes to build new words, Building compound words

Everything your child learns in Year 2 English.