Year 2 News
First Day of Year 2
We have been so proud of the students in their first few weeks of Year 2!
2A
2B
Our Learning and Celebrations
Wellbeing Activities
We began the year with some team building and wellbeing activities. The ‘ball of sting’ activity demonstrated how we are all connected and share many commonalities but also differences. Going around the circle, each child spoke about themselves. When they made a statement which matched up with another child, that child chimed in, ‘Me too!’ and the string was passed around. We ended up with a spider web of connections at the end.
We read ‘Kindness Grows’, which is a wonderful story which explores how "cracks" in friendships are formed by angry words, selfishness, and disagreements. It contrasts these negative actions with the power of kindness, showing that simple gestures—like a smile, sharing, or playing together—can heal those cracks and cause a "tree of friendship" to bloom. Each class then created our own tree of friendship. Children each decorated a ‘heart leaf’ which was filled with actions which grown kindness to fill our kindness trees.
This flowed on nicely to the year level reading the story “Have You Filed a Bucket Today.’ We discussed bucket filling behaviours and touched upon bucket dipping behaviours also.
We created a classroom essential agreement
Literacy
Phonics Plus
This term in Year 2, we have introduced Phonics Plus as part of our literacy program. Each lesson builds important reading and spelling skills, including learning letter–sound connections, spelling patterns, high-frequency words, two-syllable words, fluency and handwriting.
Students also develop phonemic awareness which is the ability to hear and work with the individual sounds in words which supports confident reading and spelling. They are beginning to explore morphemes, which are the meaningful parts of words such as prefixes, suffixes and base words, helping them understand how words are formed and what they mean.
We use decodable texts in our lessons. These are short passages carefully matched to the phonics patterns students have learned so they can practise reading successfully and independently. Students have been particularly enjoying their daily partner reading using the decodable texts, building confidence, accuracy and expression along the way.
Literacy Skills
During our literacy skills session our students have been learning how to turn two simple sentences into compound sentences using conjunctions, and, but so and or. The students are also learning how to edit compound sentences in a paragraph for correct punctuation.
Text Study
Our first text study for the term is ‘The world’s most pointless animals’. This is an information text that introduces us to many strange animals. The students are learning to identify the features of an information text and to identify facts in an information text. Last week we enjoyed learning several facts about a pufferfish. Did you know there is only one part of a puffer fish you can eat. It’s called the Fugu and it's considered a delicacy in Japan.
We also enjoyed learning some interesting facts about Zooplankton. Did you know that zooplankton eat one another and they also don’t like to share. They are a little ‘shellfish’.
Maths
In maths, the Year 2s have started the year with our new Explicit Maths Program (EMP). Each EMP lesson begins with 10 minutes of a ‘daily review quick teach’, followed by a couple of minutes of maths fluency. We have been focusing on place value, and breaking numbers down into tens and ones. The EMP will ensure children’s mathematical knowledge is comprehensive and that there are no gaps, which allows for seamless progression and development as they move through the school.
Unit of Inquiry
The Year 2s have had a lot of fun beginning our new unit – How we express ourselves. The central idea is – Communication is influenced by feelings and emotions. Last week we considered the emotion ‘joy’. We thought about what it means to be happy, what makes us happy and what we can do to help ourselves feel joy.
This week we have started to think about ‘sadness’.
We hope you enjoy watching us share what makes us happy!
What We Are Learning Next
Phonics Plus
Next week we will be looking at the grapheme phoneme correspondences of ‘ee’, ‘ea’, ‘ie’ and ‘e_e’. This is a foundational skill in phonics mapping written letters or letter groups (graphemes) to spoken sounds (phonemes) and vice versa. We will continue to focus on the formation of our upper-, and lower-case letters.
Text Study
We will continue with our text study on The World's most Pointless Animals focusing on
Text structure and organisation
Language for expressing and developing ideas
Analysing, interpreting and evaluating
In these lessons, students discuss factual information about two animals, engaging with the information text features. Students will write facts about an animal using sentence starters. The teacher will model using a website to find information, focusing on navigating to a webpage, clicking links, and using the scrollbar.
They will analyse the book and the website to compare similarities and differences. Students will use sentence starters to write three facts about animals.
Weekly Reading
The students will begin their weekly reading at home next week, and we look forward to seeing all the books they enjoy at home with their families. Keep a look out for further information on Compass next week.