Year 2 News

From Risa Hammel, Year 2E teacher

Science Experts

These past two weeks have flown by for Year 2. We have been settling back into the full swing of school routines and done a lot of learning.

English

Across reading and writing, we have done a deep dive (pun intended) exploration about sharks. We spent time researching and reading different text types, including digital resources, about sharks. Our Year 2s are now experts in shark facts, so make sure you ask them about something they learned! While researching, we did a lot of reading out loud fluency practice. This included emphasising different words, pausing for punctuation, and reading with different expressions. We really enjoyed these activities! Using all our new knowledge about sharks, we practiced writing different texts and using conjunctions to create complex sentences and interesting texts. 

Maths

We have been practicing our skip counting and multiplication. Please continue to practice skip counting with your children at home, as this fact fluency supports their deeper development and understanding of multiplication. In order to solve multiplication problems, we used many different strategies to show our thinking. This included using physical manipulatives like counters or MAB blocks, drawing pictures, skip counting, bar model, and multiplication number sentences. We have also used arrays to show how multiplication problems can be organised in rows and colums.

On Wednesday, we had a day filled with incursions, fun, and pizza. Across the day, our Grade 2s participated in BrickWorks Lego building using their fine motor skills and creativity to build lots of different creations. In a Mad About Science class, we learned all about force through hands-on experiments using cars, popping bottles, balloons, and gyrotation tools (which many recognised as beyblades). All Grade 2s then stayed past the end of school, having some play time, and then eating cookies and pizza that they had helped prepare across the day. 

Thursday was our big excursion to ScienceWorks! It was an exciting and fantastic day for our Grade 2s. Across the day, we got to go to the Planetarium and watch a movie about Mars and investigate the constellations we can see from Melbourne. We also went to the lightning room and got to experience real lightning strikes only a few feet away from us. Many of the Grade 2s favourite part of the day was exploring the Scienceworks exhibitions, such as racing Cathy Freeman or creating futuristic cars.

Well done to all our Grade 2s for having such an awesome two weeks!