Grade 2 News

📅 Important Dates & Reminders

All important dates and events are available on our Compass Calendar. Please check the calendar regularly to stay up to date.

Upcoming Dates and Key Information

Thursday 3rd September - Father’s Day Stall 

Wednesday 9th September - Melbourne Museum Excursion

Friday 18th September -Footy Day Dress Up & Last Day of Term - 2.30pm Dismissal for the last day of the term. 

*Icy Poles will be sold by the Grade 6s on Monday and Tuesdays! $1 each*

Learning Reflection

Science Day!

Our students had a fantastic day exploring, questioning and discovering during Science Day! The day included an exciting science incursion, hands-on experiments such as ‘Walking Water,’ and a range of engaging Biological Science and Earth & Space Science activities. We finished the day by welcoming families to our Open Afternoon, where students proudly shared their STEM projects and showcased their learning. 

Book Week

What a wonderful Book Week we had! Our school was filled with amazing costumes, favourite characters and a shared love of reading. Students enjoyed celebrating their favourite stories and authors, whilst getting involved in the staff “Where’s Wally? Hunt!” We all loved finishing the day with the amazing parade!

📖 Literacy

Literature

Over the past fortnight, we have been exploring some wonderful informative texts and developing our reading and writing skills along the way!

Last week, we finished our unit based on the text, ‘Walking in Gagadju Country: Exploring the Monsoon Forest’. We explored the unique features of the monsoon forest and learned about the plants, animals and environment found in Kakadu. As writers, we practised expanding simple sentences by adding fronted adverbial phrases to tell our readers when, where or how something happened. We also focused on using commas correctly in a list to add detail and make our writing clearer.

This week, we have begun our next literature unit looking at the book, ‘The Gentle Genius of Trees’. We have been fascinated by the incredible ways trees communicate, work together and grow! We learned how trees grow towards the light so they can access the sunlight they need to survive and grow. Through this text, we have continued to build our reading comprehension skills, thinking carefully about what the author is teaching us, making connections and using information from the text to support our understanding.

We have also been learning about the purpose and key features of an informative poster. Students have explored how headings, facts, illustrations and carefully organised information can help teach a reader about a topic. We then began planning our own informative posters, learning how to organise our ideas into a clear topic sentence, supporting details and concluding sentence.

Preview - Next week, students will bring their informative poster plans to life! They will use their topic sentence, supporting details and concluding sentence to turn their ideas into well-structured paragraphs. Students will then revise and edit their writing and publish their informative posters!

Side note - We are loving the home learning creations students have been making that relate to our literature unit! If you have the time and would like to get creative, here is some inspiration! Click here for more ideas.

Word Work

Knowledge Rich

Last week, we finished exploring Representing Places and developing our understanding of where we live and how we are connected to places around the world!

We have learnt how to describe where we live and explore how we are connected to other places. Students have used maps, transport and stories to think about the different places people travel to, visit and have connections with. We also explored why people can feel connected to different places around the world. Students created posters to show places they are connected to and considered the reasons behind these connections, such as family, holidays, culture, experiences, extra-curricular activities and special memories.

We also learned how to locate Australia on a globe and developed our understanding of where our country sits within the world. Students explored the continents and oceans and began to understand how Australia fits into the larger map of the Earth.

Preview - In the coming weeks, we will begin our next Knowledge Rich Unit where we will be learning about Insects!

➗ Maths 

It has been a fun-filled fortnight in Mathematics! We have been exploring 2D and 3D shapes and their properties. Students have investigated the features of polygons, including sides, vertices and parallel lines, as well as what makes a shape regular or irregular. We have also begun exploring 3D shapes, identifying and describing their faces, edges and vertices and using this knowledge to solve problems.

We have had lots of fun getting creative with shapes! Using tangrams, students created their own animals and explained the different shapes they used. They also designed their own sports fields, thinking carefully about which shapes would be most useful for different games and explaining why.

We have also been exploring patterns and turns, learning about quarter turns in both clockwise and anticlockwise directions. It has been wonderful to see students applying their mathematical thinking through hands-on, creative and real-world challenges!

Preview - Over the next fortnight, we will explore addition, subtraction and multiplication, using bar models, word problems and arrays to represent problems and explain our mathematical thinking.

😊 Wellbeing

Over the fortnight, students challenged gender stereotypes respectfully. We discussed how people can choose to do or be anything that they would like, regardless of their gender. For example, women can be firefighters, girls can play with trucks, men can be childcare workers and boys can play in the homecorner. It was reinforced that it is not useful to label people by their gender. Everyone has a unique personality with different interests. To reinforce these ideas, students were presented with three jars labelled with genders. This showed the students that the labels don't tell us much about the person. 

Another topic we explored was fair play. Students engaged in various games including charades, iSpy, Snakes and Ladders and Snap. After playing we discussed the following things to show the importance of playing fairly:

• How do the rules help us to enjoy this game? 
• What did you have to do to make that game work well for everyone and not end in a fight? 
• Should everyone be equally expected to play by the rules, regardless of their gender?

Preview - Students will learn how to respectfully disagree with someone by speaking up when someone is using gender labels to tell us what we should and should not like/or do. 

📚 Grade 2 Homework Options

If you would like some additional homework activities - CLICK HERE

From the Grade 2 Teachers

Zoe Callanan, Bronte Darvidis, Mikayla Harvey and Amanda Remington