Year 2 News
Year 2 Remote Learning
It’s been a busy time in Year 2 over the past couple of weeks. The students have continued to show resilience, persistence and patience during our online learning sessions and have completed many activities.
SMART Spelling
We have continued to work through our SMART Spelling lessons with the students becoming experts in identify the sounds and letters in words and learning various graphs, digraphs and trigraphs. We have completed a variety of fun spelling activities including fancy writing, alphabetical order, making our spelling words with playdoh, lollies and blocks, drawing in flour on the bench and writing our words on the windows with whiteboard markers.
Handwriting
The students have continued to work on their letter formation, fluency and pencil grip. Each time they revise the formation of a letter, they learn a rhyme to help them remember the sequence to form the letter. For example when learning the formation of the letter ‘p’ the students would say, “Start at 1 o'clock. Down the side, down, up, up and over, down, exit stroke.”
Narrative Writing
A highlight of our writing this term has been the students writing their own stories about a minibeast to tie in with our current Unit of Inquiry, ‘Sharing the Planet’. The students completed a rough draft, then a good copy complete with a Bold Beginning, Mighty Middle and an Excellent Ending. The final part of the process, was for the students to turn their stories into a picture story book. They spent time copying their stories into their booklet template and then illustrating each page. On the back cover the students had to write a few sentences about the story and about the author.
The students were so proud of becoming authors and illustrators and producing their first picture story books.
Array Cities and Procedural Texts
Book Week 2021
Old Worlds, New Worlds, Other Worlds
On Friday 27 August, the students arrived online dressed as one of their favourite book characters as a final celebration for Book Week.
Throughout the week the students completed several activities related to some of the shortlisted books. They began the week listening to the story of ‘Norton and the Bear’ written by Gabriel Evans. This was story about Norton who wanted to dress in a unique way but the Bear wanted to look just like him. The students designed an outfit that was unique to themselves.
The second book we read was, ‘Your Birthday was the Best’ written by Maggie Hutchings. This was a funny story about a cockroach that gate crashed a birthday party. The students loved drawing and designing their ultimate birthday cakes.
The final story we looked at for the week was, ‘Ellie’s Dragon’ written by Bob Graham. This told the story of Ellie who had an imaginary friend that was a dragon. Our students were asked to think about what their imaginary friend would look like and draw them in their scrapbook. As you can imagine, there was an immense amount of creativity.
Maths
During our maths sessions, we have continued to look at the relationship between division and multiplication. The students have drawn many arrays and learnt how to identify a row and a column. We have played many maths games online to help cement this concept.
The students loved designing their own amusement park rides to show their understanding of arrays. The students have also learnt about fact families and written the relating multiplication and division facts. This week they will be making their very own array cities with many buildings showing a variety of arrays with windows.
During our applied maths sessions, the students have enjoyed searching around their house for items that are measured in grams, kilograms, millilitres and litres.
Inquiry
Our current Unit of Inquiry, ‘Sharing the Planet’ has taken us on a wonderful adventure discovering the various minibeasts and their unique features. After our students completed a research project on their chosen minibeast, they then delivered an oral presentation complete with cue cards online. We were so proud of them and how interesting and informative their talks were.
This week the students were asked to design and make a minibeast out of any materials they could find around their house. There were minibeasts made from food, kitchen items, Lego, craft items and nature. Our students were extremely creative in their designs.
This Friday the students will be coming to class dressed as a minibeast of their choice. We are looking forward to seeing what bugs and creepy crawlies turn up to class this Friday.
Resilience Project
During our Resilience Project lessons, we have been looking at empathy and what it means to look through the eyes of others. The students enjoyed making a pair of glasses and wearing them while listening to a story and then commenting on how the characters were feeling through the story.
We have also been discussing inclusion and how people might feel if they are left out. The students discussed and came up with ideas about what they could do if they saw someone in the playground by themselves.
This week we are learning to bounce back when things don’t go our way. The students have been discussing what a good reaction would be to things not going their way and what a bad reaction would look like.
Students Taking Action
Elliott Iles from 2D took action over the weekend and gave back to the community by making a Pokemon Hunt at Cheltenham Park. He drew 20 different Pokemon Characters and hid them around the park and oval for children to find. Some are harder than others to find but after a couple of rounds you should be able to find them all.
Well done Elliot this was a lovely idea and I’m sure you have helped to put a smile on everyone’s faces.
A HUGE CONGRATULATIONS
We have said it many times before, however we couldn’t be prouder of our students and their willingness to learn and engage online with their teachers. While we are all desperate to return to our classrooms, we are making the best of the current situation and we have had an amazing term of learning covering all the areas of the curriculum.
A BIG THANKYOU to all our parents for supporting your children through this unique journey.