After maternelle, the fundamental learning cycle (cycle 2) covers the CP, CE1 and CE2 years. To follow your child’s schooling, discover the curriculum and the skills expected by the end of it. If you notice any difficulties, don’t hesitate to call on the Ora-Visio platform’s school support professionals: available online, they will listen closely and help your child avoid falling behind, all while considerably simplifying your schedule!

What are the different subjects studied?

During cycle 2, the fundamental learning cycle, 7 subjects are given particular focus, each with well-established skills to develop:

  • French: understanding and expressing oneself orally, reading, writing and understanding how the language works.
  • Modern languages: understanding spoken language, speaking at length, taking part in a conversation and discovering some cultural aspects of a modern foreign or regional language
  • Visual arts: experimenting, producing and creating, carrying out an artistic project, expressing oneself, analysing one’s own practice and relating to the work of artists, finding one’s bearings in these fields and being receptive to its questions
  • Music education: singing, listening and comparing, exploring and imagining, exchanging and sharing
  • Physical education and sport: developing physical skills and learning to express oneself using the body, mastering methods and tools through practice, sharing rules and taking on a role and its responsibilities, learning to look after one’s health, adopting a culture in this area.
  • Moral and civic education: raising awareness of moral conscience, of the rules of living together, judgement and commitment
  • Questioning the world: using scientific approaches, imagining and creating, mastering tools and methods, using different forms of expression, using digital tools, adopting ethical and responsible behaviour, finding one’s bearings in space and time.
  • Mathematics: exploring, modelling, representing, reasoning and calculating.

What are the specific features of the cycle 2 curriculum?

Across the three years of cycle 2 (CP, CE1 and CE2), the priority remains building fundamental skills — namely, reading, writing, counting and respecting others — with the French language as the central focus of learning. Over these years, meaning and automatic recall build on each other, freeing up cognitive resources to access more advanced understanding and reasoning.

 

Across all its subjects, this curriculum brings together the concrete (drawings, pictures, diagrams) and the abstract (numbers, concepts). Students also learn to justify their reasoning rationally, widening the gap between spoken and written language (the former being considerably stronger than the latter). At the same time, cycle 2 still relies heavily on the child’s intuitive knowledge to strengthen the foundations of all this learning: social knowledge (rules, conventions, customs), physical knowledge (their body, movements), spoken language and culture.