Year 2 Mainstream 

Celebrating Learning

What we have been up to: 

The Year 2 mainstream classes have had a great start to the year! We have been getting to know each other and our new routines, setting up our classrooms with birthday graphs, learning about zones of regulation and co-creating our classroom agreements. We also have two terms of gardening and students have loved being outside and getting their hands dirty.

Here’s what some of our students have said about being back at school:

“I’ve met lots of people that I don’t know and I’m exciting about being in Grade Two.” Bonnie 2A

“School has been really good. I’ve been learning new things and making a lot of new friends.” August, 2A

“The start of school has been great, I have a lot of my friends are in my class.” Roza 2A

“I like writing because I think it’s fun and I liked when got to read the new books.” Ivo 2A

“Being back at school means I get to learn new things and make new friends.” Florence 2B

“We get to learn new things in Grade Two and to do harder things.” Hazel 2B

“We get to do stuff that’s fun, like maths, and stuff that helps our brain grow.” Jamalan 2B

“We get to do more STEM.” Dylan 2B

Maths:

We started the year by building our class maths norms. This entailed identifying the things we like and don’t like about working in maths groups or pairs and we practised reasoning, convincing other people and posing questions. Skills we will be using a lot when engaging with maths this year. 

Literacy:

This term, the year 2 classes have kicked off our phonics sessions by reviewing the Little Learners Love Literacy Stages 1-6. These stages cover the consonant-vowel-consonant blends such as ‘mat’, ‘dog’ and ‘sit. We’ve then moved into blending words with adjacent consonant blends such as ‘stop’ and ‘flag’. We then reviewed our consonant digraphs: sh (shop), wh (what), ch (chop), tch (watch), ph (dolphin) and th (think). 

As we revise the writer’s process to our students, we have been focussing on gathering writing seeds which are ideas for writing that might come from books, music, objects etc. We are looking at how writers take their ideas and develop them into a written piece. 

What’s to come in the next two weeks:

As we continue to establish our very important classroom agreements, mantras and norms, the year 1/2 students will start their integrated unit ‘Living Local’. We will be walking around the school with maps and finding something old, something new and identifying the clues which tell us it is from the past.

In maths we will be finding patterns in numbers and learning about location language and mapping. This ties in beautifully with our ‘Living Local’ unit.

In the coming weeks, students will be introduced to the 6 + 1 traits of writing. Ideas, organisation, sentence fluency, word choice, writer’s voice, conventions and presentation. We will continue to use the writer’s process of planning, drafting, revising, editing and publishing to practise and hone these strong writer traits. To tie into our integrated unit we will be writing stories inspired from objects of the past. 

In week 5 we will review The Little Learners Love Literacy up to stage 6. In week 6, start on stage 7.1 sounds: ay (play), ai (snail), ee (seed) and ea (beach). and stage 6 sounds: ck, sh. To reinforce their learning, students could be practising reading at home with their take home readers.