A Message From Mrs S

Dear Parents, 

As Term 1 is coming to an end, I am so pleased with how the students have adapted to Year Two and embraced all the new challenges. Time sure does fly by when you’re having fun! The students have produced some fantastic work this term, and it has been great to get to know each and every one of them. Many students have already achieved their goals and made significant improvements, which has been wonderful to witness.

Mathematics
Prime Maths is now well and truly up and running in the class. It has been challenging already, with our focus being on column addition and subtraction, measuring length and interpreting picture graphs. As well as Prime Maths our focus for this term has been learning our 10 times tables. We have nearly mastered saying them fluently in a random order which has been very impressive. Next term we will work on the 2 times tables. Thank you to those parents who have also been encouraging their child to use their times table homework booklet, their mental multiplication skills have improved tenfold.

Literacy
This term we focused on two main genres of writing - narrative and persuasive. Our main focus has been based around correct text structure, along with introducing the idea of paragraphing. I have been truly impressed with how the class has picked up the concept of paragraphing and are experimenting with the idea. This will continue to be a focus for next term also. Within our writing blocks this term, Room 16 is trying really hard to use interesting vocabulary with great success. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your efforts in ensuring students are completing their talk homework each night. The students ideas and contributions from having these discussion have been to such a high standard, so thank you!

 
Next term I will post our main focus of learning for each key learning area, so check in Week 1 of next term. Please continue to encourage your child to complete their homework each night. Home reading and spelling needs to be done every night.

Thank you for making Term 1 a very enjoyable and productive term. I hope you and your family  have a wonderful holiday! See you all in Term 2 for another great term!

Kind regards,
Mrs Caris Szczepanik

Harmony Day

On Wednesday the 23rd of March, our school celebrated Harmony Day. Everyone dressed up in their cultural clothes or wore orange, which was the colour of Harmony Day. Our class looked spectacular! We did many fun Harmony Day activities to celebrate all the different cultures around the world.

Mrs S asked us, "What does Harmony Day mean to you?" Here are some of our answers:

We all join together - Tane
We welcome all the different people in our world - Layla
We celebrate peace as a team - Bella
We meet new people from different countries - Shirlina
We don't fight, we just accept people - Blayd

Harmony day from carisheppener

Spelling Words

As this week is a very short week, we are going to keep the same spelling words until next Thursday. This gives us lots of extra time to practice and so hopefully we will all get 100% in our test! This also means on Monday there will be no spelling test, as we will be doing the spelling test Thursday the 7th of March.

During Week 10, we will also be having a spelling review test of all the sounds we have learnt this term. This will be done in our test books so you can see what spelling super stars we are. The best way to practice is to look over all our past spelling lists and pay close attention to the focus sounds.

Good luck!

Talk Homework

Here is our Talk Homework for this week!

Maths - Measuring Length

This term we have been focussing on measuring the length of different objects using centimeters and meters. The short way to write centimeters is cm and meters is m. When you are measuring the length of an object you are measuring how long something is.

 There are three very important rules to remember when measuring the length of items.

They are:
- Make sure your ruler is lined up next to the object
- Start on 0 (not at the end of your ruler)
- Leave no gaps between your measuring tool

We use meters to measure long things such as a door, desk, playground area and length of our classroom. We use centimeters to measure smaller things such as a peg, phone, pencil and book.

We used pieces of string, which were measured to be 1 meter long, and worked in our collaborative learning teams to measure various areas outside. It was so much fun!

Measuring length in meters from carisheppener

Homework

I would just like to thank all the amazing parents of Room 16, who assist their child to complete their homework each night. It has been incredible to see the amount of students who have already completed a whole page of reading and some who are up to their 3 times tables already.  The two most important things to do daily are home reading and spelling. Spelling is crucial to develop children’s phonemic awareness and spelling test results clearly show which students are practising at home, so keep working hard. Thank you for your ongoing support!

Biological Science - Plant Update

We are happy to report that our class plants have started to grow! We are so excited to check them each day and observe the changes. We have been completing a plant observation sheet, twice each week, to see the life cycle of a plant. Our class has a plant watering schedule, so it is up to us to help our plants grow. We make sure they have plenty of water and move them into the sun. It is so exciting to see their changes!

Science from carisheppener

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Science

This week, as part of our Science program for Term 1, we planted some seedlings. Over the next few weeks we are going to monitor and observe our seedlings to see how they grow. We are also doing an investigation to see if they grow better in the sunlight or dark.

 

We also learnt about what makes something a living thing and created some very colourful posters about it. All living things must:

- move by themselves

- breathe

- grow

- reproduce

- drink and eat

 

Did you know plants can even breathe? They have pores, just like humans do, where they can breathe in the oxygen. Pretty interesting hey!

Biological science from carisheppener

VCOP - Writing

For the past 3 weeks, we have been working so hard on writing Narratives! Narratives are stories. This week we wrote a narrative about going on an adventure. We went to many different places in our classroom such as the beach, Lego Land, Adventure World and many more!

Our focus has been on including amazing vocabulary words such as energetically, impressive and commendable. Each week we create a list of WOW words that our class comes up with. Mrs S puts these WOW words on the smart board, so we can include them in our writing.

Not only do we have our own words, but then Mrs S gives us 5 teacher challenge words. We have to try to include at least 2 of those words. This weeks teacher words for our adventure narratives were:

heart stopping: so exciting or scary your heart beats quickly

fearless: you have no fear

incredible: something is amazing

adventurous: an exciting experience

breathtaking: something took your breath away

Along with focusing on vocabulary, now that we are big Year 2, we are starting to write using paragraphs. Learning paragraphs has been very tricky but practice makes perfect!

Next week there will be no TALK homework as we are going to have a Writing Assessment instead! These will be done in our Test Books so you can see what super writers we are!

Vcop from carisheppener

Prime Maths

We are very excited to announce... that our Year 2 Prime Maths books have arrived! We have been using them all week and our focus at the moment is on reading and writing numbers to 1000.

Some activities we have been doing are:
- Creating bundles of 10s using popsticks
- Making numbers using MAB blocks
- Writing numbers in their expanded form. For example 345 = 300 + 40 = 5
- Matching the numbers to the words

So far we are loving our new books. Stay tuned to see what else we have been doing in Maths!

Prime maths from carisheppener