Year 2 News
It’s fun being here with you in Year 2
The Year 2 students have had a great start to the year. It was wonderful to see all the smiling faces come through the classroom doors on day 1.
The students were grateful to be back in their learning spaces. We have spent the first few weeks learning our classroom routines and introducing the various aspects of our Literacy and Numeracy programs.
The students have been working hard and we are looking forward to the coming weeks and the exciting activities we have planned.
Literacy
The students have been working hard during our Literacy sessions and have enjoyed the various activities we have completed so far.
The students have been reintroduced to the Daily 5.
- Read to self
- Read to someone
- Listen to reading
- Work on writing
- Work with words
Daily 5 is a literacy framework that instils behaviors of independence, creates a classroom of highly engaged readers, writers, and learners, and provides teachers with the time and structure to meet diverse student needs.
The students have been participating in several activities practicing the Daily 5 and are learning to exhibit the correct behaviours.
During our writing sessions we have been learning about the 6 + 1 Traits of writing. We have introduced Ideas, Organisation, Word Choice and Sentence Fluency.
During our Ideas session the students laughed at Miss Maxwell’s hat with the lightbulb on top. This was indicating that we have lots of ideas that pop into our head that we can write about.
The students were able to choose their own topic to write about in their Writer’s notebook. There were so many topics written about from cats, to basketball, to snakes and birthdays.
During our Organisation lesson the students wrote about how they get organised for school each morning. We highlighted the importance of organising your writing into a sequential order. Our Word Choice lesson saw the students learning about ‘precise words’ and ‘bullseye words’. The students choose a topic and wrote as many words as they could related to their topic of choice.
SMART Spelling
Students will continue with the SMART Spelling approach and have 5 words to learn each week based on a Spelling focus and two BOB words (words they have misspelt in their personal writing).
SMART Spelling is based around whole words with an emphasis on meaning and vocabulary development. Students must be able to read their spelling words, understand what they mean and how to use them. Students will be introduced to the new spelling focus on a Monday and will choose their words for the week, which they will bring home in their ‘Home Spelling’ Book.
Please assist your child with learning these spelling words. Throughout the week these words will be learnt daily through a variety of Word Work activities, with a test and dictation taking place on a Friday morning.
Maths
The students have been thoroughly enjoying our maths activities both inside and outside the classroom. It has been pleasing to see their level of engagement.
The students have been introduced to the Daily 3 in Numeracy, which are:
- Maths on my Own
- Maths with Someone a
- Writing about Maths.
These skills should be practised every day. The teachers modelled positive and negative behaviours for each of the Daily 3 and what is expected during these times.
The students enjoyed selecting activities and games to practise their maths skills. They also completed a poster about the Daily 3 for Numeracy.
The students have been exploring place value through a variety of hands-on activities such as the whole year level ordering numbers, ordering the teacher’s number plates from lowest to highest number, spotting mistakes in the hundreds chart and giving reasons as to why they were wrong.
The students also completed a mixed up 100 puzzle. They have played lots of place value games with someone such as adding or subtracting 1, 10, 100 or 1000 to a given number and number sequence tic tac toe where they aimed to get three of their numbers in a row, column or diagonal.
The students also played Place Value Snakes and Ladders, where they had to identify the value of the underlined number in a 3 digit number and Place Value Number Path, where they rolled a dice 2 times to create a 2 digit number (or 3 digit number) and had to put their number on the number path where it would belong!
Inquiry
The Year 2 students have been exploring their emotions for our first Unit of Inquiry, 'Who We Are'. During this unit, students are introduced to the Inside Out Characters: Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger and Fear.
Each week students come up with a definition of the emotion and we talk about times we’ve felt that emotion. We talk about things that students do to feel Joyful, for example, or strategies that students can put in place to stop feeling angry.
Finally, students really get to know each emotion by drawing that emotion with the help of Art Hub. So far Year 2 have really enjoyed investigating Joy and Sadness. At the end of the unit students will get to dress up as their favourite emotion and we’ll watch the movie.