It's hard to believe that term 1 is over and we are already a quarter of the way through Grade 2 life. Our students have settled in and worked with persistence to learn and embed our School Wide Positive Behaviours into their daily routines. We have seen new friendships forming and growth both socially and academically for our enthusiastic students. It's been a busy term and below is an overview of what we have covered throughout the past 9 weeks.

We hope that all of our families have a wonderful Easter break and we can't wait to hear all about the exciting adventures (either near or far) that our students encounter over the school holidays.

Reading:

During term 1, the Grade 2 students have read mentor texts that linked to their Inquiry unit about emotions. We have discussed characters and built up our understanding of why characters show different emotions. Each day, students turn and talk to their peers about our texts. They share their thoughts and understandings with each other and ask questions to develop a deeper understanding of hidden message and morals. Our texts this term have included 'The Lion Inside', 'Something's Wrong', 'The Worry Balloon' and we finished off the term by reading the novel 'Stuart Little'. Students have continued to work on their decoding skills each day and have been loving using the mini whiteboards to show their understanding to their teacher. We have also focussed on improving our reading fluency by working with a fluency partner. Students have read aloud to their partners and provided each other with feedback about their expression and pace.

Writing

This term, the Grade 2 students have been focussed on generating ideas in their Writer's Notebooks. They have responded to a range of prompts about topics such as important people, emotions, mentor texts and memorable moments. In line with our Inquiry topic, the Grade 2 students have also explored their own emotions and explored that through their writing. Throughout the term, there has also been a strong focus on grammar, and in particular how to expand sentences using adjectives and adverbs. Later in the term, the Grade 2 students wrote Personal Narratives that took everyday events and added in outrageous and exciting embellishments. We hope you enjoyed looking through your child's Writer's Notebook to connect with their learning in writing this term.

Numeracy

In Numeracy this term, our students have developed their number fluency skills through our warm-up games, such as race to 100 and double hat trick. They have built on their numeracy skills of Place Value and have been learning different addition strategies, including the split and jump strategies. They enjoyed exploring number patterns, focussing on counting from any number by 2's, 5's, 10's and 3's and practised using informal and formal units to measure both themselves and objects in our classrooms. Students explored using 'greater than' and 'less than' symbols to compare numbers and linked these to alligators eating the bigger number to help embed the knowledge in their long term memory. Students have also used Essential Assessment to consolidate and extend their knowledge of concepts covered and work on individual goals.

Inquiry

This term in Inquiry the grade twos investigated emotions and how we respond to them. The first step was learning to identify and label a range of emotions that we all experience at different times in the day/week/year/our lives. Then we spent time discussing how we can respond to emotions and when we experience negative emotions how we can work through them. This learning led to us exploring empathy, and how understanding our own feelings can help us understand other peoples feelings and perspectives.

Over the term, the students enjoyed a series of lessons where they read literature, went on an excursion to the beach, worked together to perform role plays and completed some arts and craft activities to demonstrate their learnings. We look forward to applying what we have learnt and continuing to build on this knowledge as the year goes on.

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