Year 2 Mainstream 

Celebrating Learning

We have had an excursion/incursion filled two weeks in year 2 Mainstream! Our walk to the Aboriginal Advancement League was our first ever excursion as new year 2 classes! This venture out of the school grounds required students to practise listening skills, staying with their teacher and class and being respectful in public spaces. The walk aligned with our Integrated unit for this term: “Living Local- Finding our Heart”. 

We were able to see the murals at the Aboriginal Advancement League where some of our students proudly pointed out their relatives that were being celebrated on the wall. We then made our way to the St. Georges road mural where students looked upon important moments in history that our First Nations people have lived through. We as year 2 teachers were very proud of the way our students carried themselves and dealt with the challenges of being outside of their school and routines. 

Then our second incursion was the ‘World of Maths’, where students immersed themselves in activities designed to encourage reasoning, problem solving and collaboration. The students really enjoyed themselves and were sad when the incursion was over, lots of them saying they wanted more time to investigate and solve the puzzles!

Maths:

We finished our exploration of counting and patterns by representing skip counting in lots of different ways. Then we applied this pattern knowledge to a worded problem to measure our understanding. Students also investigated location language and mapping. This has tied in beautifully with our ‘Living Local’ unit. Identifying our journey to the Aboriginal Mural on google maps, using a bird's eye view map of the school to find old and new things and then drawing our own birds eye map of Rosie’s walk from the book ‘Rosie’s Walk’.  

Literacy:

Our excursions have provided us with some excellent inspiration for writing. We have developed our recount plans and drafts! We will continue to develop our planning, drafting, revising and editing skills over the next few weeks. Students continue to develop their decoding and encoding skills in our phonics sessions along with their reading fluency through partnered reading. Phonics sessions will progress through stage 5, 6 and 7.1.

On Thursday 6th March we went on our second local History Walk to Penders Park. Students identified old and new landmarks and discussed their history. On returning to their classroom, student considered the two walks and their connection to any prominent landmarks. They used the walks to inspire and create their own class mural about their connection to this local area.

What’s to come in the next two weeks:

Maths focus will turn to place value. Students will connect number names, numerals and quantities. They will make, draw and order numbers to at least 120. Maps will continue to be a reference in our integrated unit, but we will move to time and reading analogue and digital clocks.

In week 7 and 8 groups will start on stage 7.1 sounds: ee (seed), ea (beach) and y (unhappy), igh (high), ie (pie) and -y (sky). and stage 6 sounds: sh and ch. To reinforce their learning, students could be practising reading at home with their take home readers.