Grade 2 Term 3 Curriculum News

This Term Newsletter will provide you with information about your child’s upcoming teaching and learning experiences in the new term. There is also plenty of additional information provided via Compass throughout the school year, so please make a point of touching base regularly.

General
WELCOME TO TERM THREE EVERYONE! We hope you had a wonderful and safe break over the holidays. This term we will be continuing to focus on the six ‘Life Raft’ ideals of our Play is the Way program. These include – ‘Be Brave - Participate to Progress’, ‘Have Reasons for the Things You Say and Do’, ‘Treat Others as You Would Like Them to Treat You’, ‘Pursue Your Personal Best, No Matter Who You Work With’, ‘It Takes Great Strength to Be Sensible’ and ‘Be the Master Not the Victim of Your Feelings’. These Life Rafts help to guide students to continue to strive to be the best version of themselves in all aspects of schooling. Please encourage your child to continue to approach each day with positivity and wonderings about the world around them.

A few reminders:

• There continues to be an issue in the schoolyard with litter. We encourage ‘Nude Food’ wherever possible, with an extra focus on Wednesday’s, to limit the amount of rubbish going back into our environment.
• Please ensure your child’s name is on each of their belongings.

Reading
For Reading, students will continue to build on their understanding of texts by using a range of fix-up and comprehension strategies. They will complete daily Independent Reading for a sustained period of 30 minutes using ‘just right’ texts from our classroom libraries that will appropriately challenge and engage them. Students will be supported with whole-class activities, one-to-one conferences, targeted small group work and personal reading goals to support their reading development. Home reading is expected to be completed for 10 minutes per night, for a minimum total of 40 minutes per week. We encourage students to read out loud to an adult or older sibling. We ask an adult at home to support with this by recording the date, texts read and minutes completed in the yellow home reading booklets. In Semester One the students loved our author studies on Mem Fox, Aaron Blabey and Julia Donaldson. We will be continuing in Semester Two, looking at literature features of texts by authors such as Mo Willems and Roald Dahl.

Writing
In Writing, students have established excellent writing routines and have continued to show enthusiasm as authors. It has been wonderful watching our students increase the volume of writing produced as they move through the ‘Writing Cycle’ which includes: generating seed ideas, choosing an idea, drafting, revising, editing and publishing.

Students will continue to use their Writer’s Notebook to collect ‘Seed Ideas’ which are designed to stimulate their imaginations and inspire them to write. This term, we are working to develop a detailed plan, consider the purpose for writing and add detail to each piece we draft to engage our reader. We will also explore a variety of different text types as well as investigate new vocabulary and spelling strategies. Of course, students will also have daily opportunities to engage in Independent Writing. We are looking forward to celebrating the wonderful writing that will be produced throughout the term!

Maths
Term Three promises to be a busy, but exciting time in Maths! Students are working on their understanding of telling the time on both analog and digital clocks, with a focus on reading o’clock, half past, quarter to and past times. We will be exploring the relationship between multiplication and division, and how they differ from addition and subtraction. They will be asked to solve a variety of number and worded problems using strategies such as drawing or building arrays and number lines.

Students will also be discussing the chance of familiar events happening will be having a go at posing their own research questions (e.g. What is your favourite ice-cream flavour?), collect data using a table or list, before representing their findings using simple pictographs or column graphs.

In the latter part of the term, students will read and develop simple maps. They will also learn to give simple directions using language such as ‘left’ and ‘right.’

Inquiry
This term’s Inquiry unit is called ‘Where Am I?’ Students will learn to identify significant places around Victoria and understand what makes them special. We will be exploring Victorian landmarks of cultural and spiritual significance, both manmade and naturally formed.

Students will learn to understand why people have become connected to these special places around Victoria. We will identify ways that we can care for and preserve local historical sites, such as national parks and aboriginal landmarks. These include the You Yangs and why they are culturally significant to the Wadawurrung people. Students will identify different ways to care for our environment and learn about the role that we play in looking after places around us.

By the end of the unit, students will be able to describe and explain where various Victorian landmarks are located, from the sporting stadiums such as the MCG to the Murray River and the Victorian Alpine Region. Students will be able to discuss natural, managed and constructed features of these places, and how they change over time. They will also enjoy learning how to read and construct labelled maps (linking with Maths), as well as interpret data and information to describe the direction and location of places, using terms such as north, south, opposite, near and far.

Each year level team has provided their families with a detailed newsletter such as this. If you are interested in reading about all the exciting things happening across the rest of the school, these can be accessed online at our school website from early next week.