Year 2 News

What’s New in Year 2?

It’s hard to believe we are nearly at the end of week 8 and what a busy week it has been. The students thoroughly enjoy their swimming lessons and loved completing their water safety activities.

We would like to congratulate them on their excellent behaviour while at the pool. We have been busy finalising our assessment in preparation to begin writing our reports next week. 

Literacy

The focus of our Literacy sessions has been Persuasive text. The students enjoyed completing a debate with a partner on various topics, trying to convince their audience to vote for their arguments. There were certainly some very convincing points of view and informative information.

This week the students wrote a persuasive piece titled, Cats are better than dogs. They had to decide whether they agreed or disagreed and give reasons for their arguments. Once again the students were very convincing and enjoyed trying to persuade their readers. 

Today the students started writing their persuasive letters to Santa. The task was for the students to write to Santa and tell him what they wanted for Christmas. They had to give reasons why they think they deserve the item and try and persuade Santa to bring it for Christmas. It has been very entertaining reading the student’s persuasive letters.  

Tomorrow the students will complete their letters and post them to the North Pole. Next week the students will be writing to Mrs Duffy to try and persuade her on a variety of topics. 

We are extremely proud of the progress the students have made with their writing this year. They have learnt to write in a variety of text types and their writing is showing greater maturity. 

Numeracy

Last week in maths we revised reading and writing the time to quarter past and quarter to on both an analogue and digital clock. We completed a matching activity where the children cut out a time on an analogue clock and paired it with the digital time shown. We played a fun game where the children made a time on their own clock sheet and moved around whilst the music was playing. When the music stopped they recorded the time on the clock that they were at. 

We also played a game in pairs to see who could get to the next hour the fastest. They rolled a dice and moved the hands according to the instructions such as if you land on 1 you move 15 minutes forward, 2 – 30 minus, forward etc.

This week we were looking at money by adding amounts of coins and giving change from a certain amount. The children selected items from a toy catalogue to the value of $50, worked out how much they spent and the change they would get back. We played “Mathopoly” where the children worked out the change required from $1 and “Let’s go Shopping” where they collected the coins on the spaces they landed and if they do not have the coins work out another combination to take that amount. They then had to work out how much money they had collected in total.

Over the last two weeks we have played a lot of fun “hands on” games to reinforce and practise the concepts of both time and money.

Inquiry

During the last couple of weeks of Inquiry the students have completed their Summative Assessment Task. They made terrific posters on all of the types of forces they learnt about during, How the world works. We learnt about gravity, push and pull forces, magnetism and friction.

We have now started our final Unity of Inquiry for the year, How we organise ourselves, where students will investigate how communities function through services and systems. We have unpacked our central idea and we are looking forward to going on a walk to our local shops and exploring all of the services and systems, like water, electricity, waste services, and the local shopping centre.