Grade+2+2015

Students of the Week!

 Every Tuesday fortnight (5th of May, 19th of May and so on...) at 2.45pm, the Grade Twos get together and share our learning at assembly in the wet area of the Green Building. All student's families are welcome to come along. We always celebrate our five star work, projects and give out our Student of the Week Awards.

  Wonderful Writing and  Grade 2 Assembly!

Grade Two have started this term with letter writing and the very important, special task of writing a letter to their families, inviting them to join our Grade Two fortnightly assembly. We learnt about greetings and closings and the format of a letter. We worked hard at editing them and getting them just right for publishing. The result was - success! We were very happy to see a turnout of 30 relatives come to join in our celebration of our learning. We presented Student of the Week awards, examples of five star work and a photo slideshow celebrating our hard work in our maths lessons. Overall, it was a complete success and everyone felt really happy. The students truly appreciated the purpose of our letter writing. Our invitation is a continued open invitation, and we welcome all families of our Grade Two students to join in our fortnightly assembly. 

Marvelous Maths! Grade Two have been working hard this year on their skills and knowledge of place value - understanding how to make, record, order and interpret 2, 3, 4 and even 5 digit numbers. We have been using concrete materials, bundles of technology and written computation to improve our maths thinking. We have been persevering with our automatic recall of addition and subtraction number facts and we are really becoming faster and faster with our facts! We have also been working hard at keeping our workbooks organised and achieving five star work. For grade 2 maths, the sky isn't the limit - we're astronauts! 

Setting Goals At the beginning of the school year each grade two class worked on their own individual goals for learning for the 2015 school year. We then met as a team and students worked together to create a common mission statement. We also each brainstormed 5 star work in Reading, Writing, Handwriting and Numeracy, which in turn students identified the 5 goals that they thought were the most important in 5 star work. These are displaying in each of our learning areas along with work that students have completed that display Five Star Work.
 * [[image:5star.JPG width="236" height="326"]][[image:5star2.JPG width="236" height="333"]] || [[image:5star3.JPG width="248" height="325"]] |||| [[image:5star4.JPG width="243" height="330"]] ||

Reading In Reading we are working hard at our comprehension skills by learning how to find the main idea, sequence, summarise and recall facts and details. We are revising and learning our letter sounds and patterns and learning how to use reading strategies to read new words, such as chunking the word into smaller words and patterns. We love doing different activities about books we read, such as using puppets to roleplay the stories, working with lots of new words to add to our vocabulary and reading, reading, reading! Writing In Writing, this term we focused on writing recounts. We wrote journal entries about our weekends and holidays, as well as writing about experiences such as games and events at school. We have started learning about the writing process and what it means to start with pre-writing and planning, then draft our ideas, edit, revise, conference with a friend, conference with the teacher and publish our work. We enjoy publishing our work on lined or coloured paper, or typing it using Microsoft Word using a netbook or tablet. Numeracy In the grade two area we have introduced numeracy concepts into the beginning of our school day. Students are responsible for updating the classroom calendar each morning. They also record the weather and temperature for each day. We have begun to record the days that we have been at school. Students must display this in a number of different ways including writing the number words, numerals, tally marks and on a 100 chart.

Students have been working on developing their understanding of place value. They have been building their knowledge of making and ordering large numbers.

The grade twos have explored different types of patterns. They have discovered that patterns are not only made with colours or shapes but can be made with numbers. They have also looked at patterns that are naturally apparent in our environment.

Inquiry Students have been learning about Communities. They have explored a different range of communities, including those in which they live, animal communities and our school community. Students have brainstormed important resources and professions that communities require. They have developed maps of their own imaginary communities and discussed in groups the careful placement of important buildings, such as hospitals, fire stations and schools.

Students have also explored maths concepts that relate to communities and had a fantastic time exploring numbers in our community.