What's Happening in Grade 2
What a spectacular and exciting start to the last term of the year! The Grade 2’s have recently participated in and created wonderful and memorable experiences at the Grade 2 Sleepover and the Art Show! Students engaged in a variety of activities including outdoor games and charades. Their teamwork and resilience skills shone through when the children prepared a delicious breakfast for the Grade Preps as well as preparing their lunch for the next day. The Art Show was a huge success, with Grade 2 students embedding our geography learning about the local community into a fabulous 3 dimensional piece of art. Additionally, our mini artists sold their fabulous pieces to raise much needed funds for our school.
Mathematics
Within our number component of Mathematics, we have recently concluded our multiplication and division unit, where students were introduced to a scope of strategies, such as repeated addition/subtraction on a number line, arrays, equal groupings and skip counting to solve and represent multiplication and division problems. We have made a start to our fractions unit, where our mathematicians will learn to recognise and describe halves, quarters and eighths as equal parts of a whole.
In our non-number component of Mathematics, the children have been busy describing the likelihood of real-life events occurring to develop their language of probability. They have used words such as, ‘certain’, ‘likely’, ‘unlikely’ and ‘impossible’. Grade 2 students have been learning to measure, compare and order the capacity and/or volume of everyday items using informal units. They have been using hefting and balancing scales to demonstrate their ability to identify which objects are lighter or heavier.
English
In writing, we have just wrapped up our focus on narrative writing, where students successfully created narrative texts that included a descriptive orientation and complication with the intention of entertaining their readers. It has been incredibly pleasing to see students adding such detailed and vivid descriptions to their writing pieces! We will now move onto our next text focus, expositions - where children will be given ample opportunities to construct one-sided arguments on various topics of interest.
In reading, students have strengthened their understanding of narrative texts and will continue to build their understanding of expository texts for the rest of the term by exploring the structure, purpose and language features of an assortment of appropriate texts. We will continue to examine authors’ use of conjunctions, adjectives, nouns and present/past tense verbs to make their writing interesting and complex for the remainder of the term.
Future Focused Learning
Our inquiry unit this term has begun with the consolidation of Term 3’s geography unit, with a focus on Local Community. Students have learned that the common characteristics and interests they share with people creates a local community of recreation, learning, food/supplies, worship, etc. Grade 2 children have not only been able to recognise how they are connected to different places, but have also been able to identify different ways of caring for these special places. We will continue examining our national community, Australia, and eventually branch out to explore our Global Community, where students will be immersed in an exciting ‘My Country of Origin’ project.
We thank you for your continued support throughout what has been a magnificent year. We look forward to a busy but exciting few weeks ahead!
Miss Mercado,
Miss Mercieca,
Ms Kourkoulis
Grade 2 Team