Years 2 & 3

It has been a great start to the term in Years 2 and 3 - we have been powering through some work.

This term our text-based unit is 'poetry' and we have begun exploring some classic children's poems through in our daily fluency practice, reading On the Ning Nang Nong by Spike Milligan and The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear. The rhythm and repetition in these poems supports students to access some complicated vocabulary. We all now know what a runcible spoon is! We have read several other poems as well as rhyming books and stories as well as writing our first poems for the term. In writing sessions we have gotten hands-on with our editing, chopping up our work into sentences and physically rearranging it in to paragraphs. We have also continued to review and expand our knowledge of word types, completing a sorting activity and working on including adverbs in our sentence writing. 

In Maths we have continued to build fluency with multiplication facts through daily practice and games. Extended learning activities have focused on dividing into equal groups. Word problems have proved tricky for us and so we have taken time to practice skills in identifying language in word problems that give us clues that help us solve them. 

In Wellbeing we have begun examining gender roles and expectations. The students dived into this topic enthusiastically and have shown thoughtfulness and respect. We began by exploring the concept of 'boy' things and 'girl' things. We collected some information about our preferences and characteristics (eg favourite colour, likes gaming, wears shorts sometimes, rides motorbikes etc) and concluded that boys and girls can do and like all kinds of different things. We also considered what a 'label' is and in what ways labels can be helpful or harmful. The students connected this with the Trolls 2 movie, using this movie to discuss how labels can isolate people and talked quite beautifully about the harmonies created when differences come together. 

We have been lucky to have Miss P at school every day this week, and the 2/3 students enjoyed using the Book Creator app on the iPads to make digital menus based on the vegetables. For some students it was the first time using this app, and they took to it like ducks to water! Well done, grades 2 and 3!

Today students created some beautiful artwork with Miss P during her MARC Van library session.