Home Learning Updates

Dear Parents,

We have made it through five weeks of home learning! We are very proud of our students hard work during this time, especially with their animal researching and writing. We know they couldn't do it without you! In the interests of student wellbeing, we are scheduling a relaxed day on Monday. We will still provide an outline of activities for the day, but they won't require work to be posted on Seesaw. In reading, students will read for enjoyment from a book of their choice. For writing, they will write a letter to someone that can be mailed, dropped off or hand delivered. This could be someone they want to connect with or it could be an appreciation letter. For Maths, students will have a choice of Maths game or can play a maths-based game at home, eg. Yahtzee. For UOI, students can learn to draw some animals by following directed drawing videos on Art for Kids Hub. We will still post the Specialist activities. We will have our regular Google Meets with a fun theme and will still run our small group literacy and maths sessions. This daily schedule will be posted as normal.

Writing

We will focus on writing fluency this week with the popular ‘Rocket Writing’. To build writing stamina, children will set a stop-watch to see how long they can write for without stopping. They will then set a goal to write for longer the next day. We will still base our writing on animals but shift the focus to story writing. Students will edit and publish their favourite piece toward the end of the week.

Reading

In reading this week, the students will complete a reading assessment on non-fiction information texts, in which they will film themselves talking about a text.

After that, the students will transfer their learnt skills in summarising and finding the main idea to fiction texts. It is important that the students continue to consolidate the strategies they have learnt to 'check for understanding', 'back up and re-read' and 'tune into' or solve interesting words. At the end of a text, or a section of text, you can:

Ask your child to describe what the text was about in their own words.
Ask your child to identify questions they can now answer about the text.

If they are struggling to summarise the text or find the main idea, encourage them to back up and re-read and use one of the strategies that we have learnt such as: pointing to each finger to recall key details, then pointing to your palm to say: "so this text is mostly about...".

Word Study

Students will continue to practise their codes based on their self-assessments, combined with teacher feedback. We are continuing our Bootcamping of Rules 4 and 5.

Unit of Inquiry

This is our final week of this unit of inquiry. Students have learnt about animal classification, adaptations and links between living things and their environment. Their summative assessment task this week is to make a habitat diorama. They will make at least 1 animal that lives in the habitat and explain how it is suited to its environment. Students may present their work in a video or use PicCollage to combine a photograph and writing.

Here are some examples of dioramas:

Mathematics

On Monday students can choose a Maths game they have played before. The links to the video instructions are on the Monday schedule. We encourage students to spend 5 to 10 minutes each day playing one of the suggested games. When played repeatedly, games support the development of computational fluency. They also encourage strategic mathematical thinking as students find different strategies to solve problems.

From Tuesday we have planned some fun tasks such as creating a life-sized coral reef, to bring together everything they have learnt about measurement. The concept of measuring area will also be introduced.

The Grade Two Team

2A- Angie Fifer

2B- Angela Alderuccio

2C- Elise Newnham

2D- Breallen Cole

HU- Christie Walsh

Issue 8

Issue 15 · 21 Aug 2020

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