Year 2 News
North Melbourne Primary School
From Risa Hammel, Year 2E teacher
Spooky stories, friendship bracelets, and arrays have filled the Year 2 agenda for the last couple weeks.
English
Our Year 2s have spent some time investigating spooky stories from all different cultures and mediums. Using spooky stories we have looked at text features in non-fiction and fiction texts, as well as stories from digital platforms. It is important that our Grade 2s know how to navigate digital texts and can recognise how that information is organised and laid out. We have used a large variety of spooky characters to compare and contrast settings, characters, and moods, such as Casper, the Bunyip, Yurei, and La Llorona.
After all of our research and investigating of different spooky stories, our Year 2s used everything they learned to inspire lots of writing pieces. We created spooky word banks, filled with tons of great word choice. Abandoned, creaking, crept, and suspicious are just a few! Using our word banks, we focussed on using our five senses to describe spooky scenes. What noises might you hear in an abandoned house? What feelings would come over you? We all agree that these spooky stories have been the most incredible writing we have done all year!
Maths
We have been practicing their multiplication and division skills. We have used counters, number facts, and arrays to model our thinking for these operations. Remember the multiplication symbol means “groups of” and our arrays show us how many groups we have.
We started our division unit by halving numbers, or dividing them by 2 and looking at how multiplication facts help us solve division problems. We again used arrays and counters to show our thinking. Our division symbol means “shared evenly between” and our bar models can help us understand our part-part-whole relationships. Our Grade 2s then used their division understandings to solve word problems, such as “James shared 12 cupcakes with 2 friends. How many cupcakes did each friend get?”
We also spent some time creating friendship bracelets for our stall at the fete this past Friday! It was amazing to see the creativity and craftiness from all of our students, and the willingness to create something for the fete. All the teachers loved seeing the Year 2s and their families at the fete, and well done to all the students who guessed the teacher from the baby photos! Some of them were tricky!
Thank you to all for the smiles at pick-up time every day!