Year 2 News

Year 2 Welcome Back to Term 4

It was lovely to see our students smiling faces appear on the screen on our first Monday morning connection. The students were eager to talk about their holidays and share the activities they did or the friends they saw in the local parks. We had a great start to the week with several exciting activities for the students to take part in. They were very excited when we announced what we were going to be doing on day 1 and 2. 

Movie Fun

On our first day of Remote Learning we watched an excellent video on Forces to introduce our new Unit of Inquiry, Sharing the Planet. We then watched the first half of Toy Story to continue introducing our unit as we were looking at the way toys move. It was a great start to the week and very engaging for the students.

Literacy

SMART Spelling

This term we will continue to work through our SMART Spelling lesson focusing on our final spelling patterns for the year. The students have become experts in identifying many more graphs, digraphs and trigraphs when writing and are becoming more confident to edit their own spelling mistakes. We encourage our students to continue to complete a variety of spelling activities each week to assist them to learn their weekly spelling words in preparation for our test each Friday. 

family letters and will be preparing to obtain their joining and pen licence in Year Three next year. 

Writing

Procedural Text

We have been focusing on how to write a procedural text. Last term the students wrote a procedural text on how to make coconut chocolate balls and how to make a minibeast of their choice. This week we wrote a procedural text on how to make an air cannon which tied in with our new Unit of Inquiry on Forces. The students are learning how to write their steps in point form and draw a picture to explain each step. 

At the start of term the students also drew pictures about their holidays and wrote several sentences about what they did. Many students spent a great deal of time outdoors playing at parks, going on bike rides and walks with the family. Our students had very different holidays than they normally would. 

Grammar and Comprehension

We have continued to revise and learn about synonyms and antonyms. Last week the students enjoyed listening to two synonym stories. The first was, ‘If you were a Synonym’ and the second was ‘Pitch and Throw, Grasp and Know’.  The students enjoyed trying to list as many synonyms for a particular word in a given time and playing a synonym memory game also. This week we will revise antonyms and play several games to reinforce the students understanding. 

This week the students will be ‘Checking for Understanding’ as they read through a story titled ‘Jimmy’s Treasure’. They will have to answer several comprehension questions based on the text. The accuracy of their answers will depend on the understanding of the story. 

Maths

In Maths, we have been learning about the fractions one-half, one quarter and one eighth of a shape and a collection through a variety of hands on activities. The children have enjoyed cooking ham and pizza scrolls where they cut up the roll into equal parts. We even arranged them on the baking tray as arrays so that we could easily count how many were made! We have divided shapes and food into different fractions and labelled each part. We have played a fun game where the children have to stand on a piece of paper and then when the music stops have to fold it into half and then half again each time until they can no longer stand on their piece of paper. We also played a Roll a Fraction bingo game against our teacher and worked out the fractional value of certain letters on a minibeast.

We are also investigating 3D shapes and are learning to use the language associated with this such as sides, surfaces, corners and edges to identify and explain common 3D shapes. We have drawn the front of our house and labelled as many 2D and 3D shapes that we noticed and looked for 3D shapes in our home and real world. The children have also written “What am I” clues for a chosen shape and the grade had to guess what shape it was. 

Inquiry

The Year 2 cohort has started this term with a bang and a whoosh from the air cannons they made to demonstrate forces. Our new unit of inquiry is ‘How the World Works’ and our central idea is ‘Forces Change the way Things Move.’ In our first two weeks, we have been learning about push and pull forces that affect our toys. We watched Toy Story and then each student brought different toys to the screen and showed how their toy moved. Each student was then able to demonstrate the non-contact force of air and moved confetti around their houses. We hope they cleaned up afterwards. Next stop: buoyancy!

The Resilience Project

This term we have been writing letters to our family members expressing our gratitude. We discussed all the things that our parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles, brothers and sisters and caregivers have done for us during remote learning. These letters thanked family members for cooking meals, playing games, or caring when students felt upset. We also discussed challenging situations and how we can respond when things don’t go our way. Afterwards the students made some fantastic comic strips about these scenarios.

That’s a wrap

It’s been a big two weeks in Year 2 and although our students are doing the best they possibly can online, we are noticing their screen fatigue and lack of motivation. We can’t wait to be welcoming all our little people back on site in the coming weeks for some much need reconnection time and fun with their friends. I’m sure we are all counting down the days.