Singing with Deb

Today Deb introduced another new song for us to learn next term. The song is Moonstruck from the musical 'Our Miss Gibbs' and it was written in 1909. Here is a link to the song for you all to listen to at home: Moonstruck

Bazaar: Talent Quest Auditions

Talent Quest auditions for the school Bazaar will take place in Week 1 of Term 4. Children are being asked to think about and plan their performances over the holidays. Short acts are best! Children can sing, dance, play an instrument, tell jokes or perform a short skit. 

International Dot Day

On Tuesday the Year 2 Neighbourhood celebrated International Dot Day. Dot Day began in 2009 when a teacher Terry Shay introduced The Dot book by Peter H. Reynolds to his class. The aim of Dot Day is to encourage creativity, courage and collaboration. The Dot is a beautiful story about a caring teacher who encourages a child to 'make a mark'. It begins with a small mark on the page and leads to the child developing confidence, self belief and courage. We began our celebration by viewing The Dot and discussing the meaning of the book. The children then had the opportunity to take part in a variety of dotty learning experiences, including creating 3D shapes using the pointillism technique, representing an emotion on a coloured dot, creating their own dotty pictures with watercolour, making dotty animation and going on a dot hunt. Below are some photos from the day. 

Neighbourhood Artwork

Creating dot drawings

Emotions on dots

Jonah enjoying the floor dots

Pointillism

Holiday Learning

At the beginning of next term we will be having a maths investigation around the number 42. To support this mathematical investigation we are asking the children to look for the number 42 in the holidays and record by drawing, photographing or writing where they see the number. We also would like the children to begin to understand how far 42km is. If it is possible we are asking the children to take photos showing where you end up when you drive 42km from Princes Hill (home) and to time how long it takes to get there. 

Happy Holidays!!!

Diamante Poetry Writing

Over the last few weeks the children have been learning about nouns, verbs and adjectives to support their poetry writing skills. Our focus has been writing Diamante Poems that relate to our inquiry projects. The structure of a Diamante poems is as follows:

Noun

Adjective, Adjective

Verb, Verb, Verb

Noun, Noun, Noun, Noun

Verb, Verb, Verb

Adjective, Adjective

Noun

The nouns at the top and the bottom of the diamond are the focus/topic of the poem and the other words describe/relate to these nouns. 

The children first experimented writing diamante poems in a small group and have now individually written a poem that will be published and included in their portfolios. 

Here are the first poems to be published. A high standard has been set. 

Social and emotional awareness

This week we started building our emotional awareness by identifying with one of these five characters throughout the day to externalise how we were feeling inside. It was an easier way of seeing who was OK or who needed some extra care and support.

Next week we're going to develop our observation skills further by tracking our emotional states throughout the day (before school, before lunch, after lunch and at the end of the day). We hope that after analysing it that we'll be able to identify and workshop some strategies for managing our emotional states more effectively.

As you can see below, the characters help by showing facial expressions, body language and an extended vocabulary.

If the opportunity presents itself, talk with the family about the emotional states that are experienced at home. A fun activity might be to cut out faces from magazines and determine what emotion they are displaying. Here are all the characters if you want a closer look...

The Solar System Song

This week in singing with Deb the children were introduced to a new song called 'The Solar System." Here is a link to the song: The Solar System Song

Week 10 Happenings

Last Week of Term 3

Friday finish 2:30

Tuesday

Art & Italian (2J)

Italian & PE (2A)

PE & Art (2S)

International Dot Day - Wear dotty clothing to school. We will be taking part in some dot inspired learning to celebrate!

Thursday

Art (2A)

Italian (2S)

PE (2J)

Singing with Deb

Library 

Friday

Last Day of Term 3: School finishes at 230

Assembly at 2pm

International Dot Day!

Year 2 will be celebrating International Dot Day on Tuesday in week 10. Children are invited to wear dots on Tuesday and bring their imagination. The Dot was written by Peter H. Reynolds and encourages everyone to "Make your mark and see where it takes you!" 

Literacy and Numeracy Focus - home learning opportunities

Hi everyone,

Take a look at the concepts, skills and strategies that we are exploring in Literacy and Numeracy below and links to home learning opportunities.

LITERACY

We have begun exploring Poetry as a creative way to express ideas and describe our observations of the world, starting with Diamante poems. Through diamante poems, we are able to focus on learning Nouns, Verbs and Descriptive words. Throughout the week, the children are going to be collecting words that fit into these three categories. We will then explore which descriptive words add more detail to nouns (adjectives) and which add more detail to verbs (adverbs).

By exploring grammar in this way, the children will develop a bank of new vocabulary and learn how to use it to enhance sentences. With practise, they will be able to transfer this skill to their own writing.

At home, you can explore how to enhance basic sentences to make them more interesting with this interactive resource:

http://splash.abc.net.au/home#!/media/31977/wonderful-words-creative-stories-pets


NUMERACY

Inquiry Focus: 
Our Inquiry projects have involved designing rovers, nest box installation designs and making model of parts of the body. The children have needed to use a variety of shapes in their designs and we have assessed that they are not very familiar with the names and features of 2D and 3D shapes. We have begun an investigation into shape and the children are enjoying learning to name, describe, draw and design with shapes and find the total number of sides in their designs by using their multiplicative strategies.

Targets:
Throughout term 2 and 3 we have been developing our understanding of equal groups and arrays to represent multiplication problems. The children are being targeted in the strategies they require to solve these problems, ranging from additive strategies (skip counting), to multiplicative strategies (multiplication). We are now applying these understandings and strategies to solve AREA. We are using grid paper to draw pictures and designs and we are finding the area of ours and others' designs.

These ideas may be extended for some children to investigating surface area and volume of 3 dimensional shapes using multiplicative strategies.

Please visit the tab at the top of our blog called "mathematics: great digital links" and find a variety of interactive resources and games to further explore shape, area and perimeter.

Place Value:
Place value is a constant feature of our mathematics teaching as it underpins all conceptual understandings in number. Place value tells us that the 4 in 45 represents 4 tens. Knowing the strategy of adding in place value parts helps us add 2-digit numbers without counting by ones i.e. 32 +56 is  2ones+6 ones=8 ones and 5 tens+3 tens=8 tens, which is 86. When the ones add to more than 10, we must rename 10 ones for 1 ten.

WISHBALL is a fantastic game that allows children to practise their place value understanding at their stage of conceptual development.

Please visit this website to choose a level that suits your child (try wishball with TENS before moving on to hundreds or thousands or beyond).

http://splash.abc.net.au/home#!/resources/wishball

Action Required: FATHERS DAY STALL THIS FRIDAY

Hi all,

The Father's Day/ Carer's stall is this Friday. Year twos will be shopping at 10am. If your child would like to buy a gift, could you please provide some money in a purse or zip lock bag and a plastic bag to carry their items.

Thanks everyone!

Action Required: Tissues Needed

The Year 2 Neighbourhood has run out of tissues and we have lots of children with running noses and colds. If you can bring in a box this week it would be greatly appreciated. 

Thank you!