Year 2

Welcome to Week 5

It has been wonderful to spend the last 3 weeks getting to know your children. We are now well into the swing of things and becoming better at responding to new routines and cues. A lot has changed about how we do things at St. John's and the students have certainly noticed these big changes. Read on to learn more!

This year in our class, Mrs Lister is our Learning Support Office (LSO)

Congratulations to Mrs Lister for recently completing her Certificate IV in School Based Education Support! She spent countless hours of study and worked extremely hard alongside our other LSO's over the 2024 school year. 

InitiaLit

The MultiLit InitiaLit program in Year 2 is a structured literacy program designed to support students in building strong reading and writing skills. It focuses on essential areas such as phonics (the relationship between sounds and letters), spelling, and reading fluency. Through engaging activities and targeted lessons, InitiaLit helps students develop a solid foundation in decoding words, improving their reading comprehension, and constructing simple sentences. The program is evidence-based and designed to be accessible for all learners, especially those who may need extra support. With regular practice, InitiaLit helps children become more confident and capable readers and writers, setting them up for long-term success in literacy.

Our Storybook lessons have focused on Willy the Wimp and Pete the Sheep so far. Storybooks change each fortnight and run with the scripted InitiaLit lessons provided with each text.

In writing, students have been exposed to imaginative texts and are beginning to explore our next genre of information texts. We will showcase our learning in the later edition of the Classroom Communications at the end of the term.

We have a tricky word tree and three tricky words are usually the focus over a week, as well as our spelling sounds. Nouns have been the focus of our grammar lesson.

So far we have looked at ee/ea, oa/ow, i/ igh. 

Numeracy

This year, Sandhurst Diocese is using the Ochre platform for numeracy (F-6) 

In Year 2, we have been focusing on number and place value into the hundreds. Some of the skills we have revisited in the past few weeks are: identifying numbers into the hundreds; distinguishing between numerals and digits; ordering hundreds numbers; writing the names of numerals in the teens and tens, to one hundred; and partitioning three-digit numbers.

We move forward now to our next unit in measurement. Concepts will include time; reading analogue and digital clocks; duration of time; calendars and reading timetables.

Religion

Currently our Source of Life unit is We Can Pray in Different Ways. In this unit, students have the opportunity to explore their relationship with God and with others. We started by looking at what makes a good relationship and we thanked God for the special people in our lives that love and care for us. We will learn some formal prayers and how we can pray in may different ways to deepen our relationship with God.

Inquiry Learning

This term we will explore two different topics People in Our Community, and Learning about the Past. In these units, we touch on the History curriculum at F-2 level. Students have been busy learning about the people in their community and how they contribute to build our town. They have worked collaboratively to become town planners and design their own ideal town.

The Resilience Project

We will again be learning from the Resilience Project Curriculum, so far focusing on emotional intelligence. As we only complete one lesson per week, we haven't yet had much of a chance to share with you what we have learnt. Our next few topics are around spreading kindness, settling into Year 2, exploring how we feel and how we show empathy.

GEM chats are a great way to have a conversation with your child without them giving you a yes/no response. Why not try this on the way home, to dance class, before bed or on a weekend?

Dr Michael Carr-Gregg

Psychologist and guru on all things about kids mental health. I was fortunate to attend the workshop put on by the Strathbogie Shire on Thursday evening. A takeaway I had from Dr Carr-Gregg's incredible presentation and wealth of knowledge was that our children are at a greater risk of mental health issues than any other generation before them. We need to be building resilient kids. Share your day with your children, the good and the bad. They learn to handle difficult situations by watching you. Limit screen time and switch them off well before bedtime. 

Ms Ally is our MHiPS (Mental Health in Primary Schools) leader for 2025. She is incredible at finding solutions to problems and helping students to deal with their big emotions. If you have any concerns about your child, big or small, please reach out to myself, or Ms Ally, ajohnston@sjeuroa.catholic.edu.au. She will be more than happy to help you.

STEM Challenge

Camp week meant that Mr Asquith (Nic) was away, so we had the challenge to work together and make the longest paper chain. Considering we were only allowed to use an A4 piece of paper, scissors and glue, they all came out very differently!

If you have any concerns, questions or stories to share, please feel free to email me rtimperley@sjeuroa.catholic.edu.au. I am available before school 8-8.30 Monday to Thursday. Please keep in mind that we have staff meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons.

Until next time,

Rachel, Fiona and Lisa.