What a delight it has been to witness the students in Grade 2 share their learning with their families this week! I heard laughter, questions, excitement and joy during these conferences and I hope you enjoyed finding out more about your child’s academic, social and emotional progress they have made throughout this school year.
This week the students have worked hard to prepare for their Student Led Conferences…this is a big step in their reflective practice as related to their responsibility or their own learning. They worked on identifying their learner profile attributes and how they are doing with regards to their work habits and social skill. They also though carefully about what strengths they have and in which areas they feel they need some improvements; from this the students were able to choose goals for the rest of the year and how a grownup could help them achieve their goals. The final step was for the students to rehearse with their peers to be prepared for sharing their knowledge with you.
This week was also Book Week where we have been involved in a variety of activities. On Tuesday morning, we had an exciting visit from Grade 6 so we could participate in buddy reading. The Grade 6 students brought in books to read with us and then some of the Grade 2 students chose books they wanted to be read. It was such a lovely time for the older and younger students share their love of reading.
Excitedly, on Wednesday morning we visited the library to participate in the book swap, there were so many books to choose from that the students spent some time considering which books to take home.
For literacy this week, we participated in a guided reading session and some speaking and listening activities. As a class, we listened to a story, then answered comprehension questions about the story. Some students also needed to finish up their procedure writing from the previous week.
For maths this week, we continuing developing our mental maths skills, finished up some place value work and then looked for numbers which add to 10. From this we listed the sums to 10 and answered the questions: what do you notice? what do you wonder? This reinforces the connection between numbers, the relationship between addition and subtraction and also how we can look for patterns in maths.
For our current unit: How the world works, where we are looking at simple machines we found the definitions of simple machines and began identifying their features and how they work. We also created a list of items which use simple machines – it’s quite a list! Today we listened to a very funny story: ‘Stuck’ by Oliver Jeffers in which a young boy throws items into a
-which simple machines might be useful to get the things out of the tree?
Here is the book if you’d like to listen to it.
During our social emotional learning time we have been working naming and recognising our different moods and attitudes. Today the students worked in groups to decide which emotions might be classified as ‘bad’, ‘good’ or somewhere in between.
For next week:
Literacy:
- guided reading
- procedural writing tasks
- using phonics to make and spell words
- handwriting practise
Maths:
- number line and 100 square 2-digit addition strategies
- mental maths strategies
UOI:
- identifying features of simple machines
- describing how simple machines work
- building objects which use simple machines
Please see Book Week photos here.
Please see class photos here.