Year 2 Mainstream 

Celebrating Learning

What we have been up to: 

As we wind up term 2 and our unit on ‘Caring for Country’ students have been continuing to present and listen to each other’s projects. Wow, they have been great! We have listened to speeches with power points, watched student made movies, looked at posters and dioramas and played ‘Caring for Country’ student made computer games on Scratch. Students loved sharing their work and taking comments and questions at the end.

In gardening students took a closer look at mushrooms and discussed and recreated their Mycelia (the root-like network of thin filaments called hyphae that form the body of a mushroom). They then got to make and paint one!  

Maths:

We have continued focussing on the mental computation of basic facts to 20 and their connection to subtraction facts. Students have been applying their addition strategies to subtraction problems. We extended this understanding to solving addition and subtraction with the vertical algorithms. Students lined up the numbers underneath each other based on their place values (ones, tens, hundreds, etc.) and then added or took away each column separately, starting from the right. Students were very excited to have a go and understand why this worked. We have also started exploring different measurements for mass, including estimating then measuring using informal and then formal units. 

Literacy:

Students continue to develop their knowledge in phonics through long vowel sounds, including oa (goat eating toast) and the review of stage 7.2 sounds. In writing, we are finishing off our look at persuasive texts and how we can convince the reader to see a point of view. Students argued T.P.S. should/ should not be a ‘nude food’ school and how important it is for humans to start caring for the environment.

What’s to come in the next two weeks:

The school holidays will finally be here! While we are not at school together, here are some ways families can maintain growth and support learning at home:

• Continue our home reading program. Record any books that you read from the library or your own collection. If your child is choosing a text that is ‘too easy’, work on other skills like fluency and comprehension strategies (such as retell and vocabulary).
• Visit your local library. It's a fun, free activity for the whole family. 
• Listen to audio books
• Play lots of card games.
• Use the photos in our newsletters to stimulate conversation about school and learning!