Reading

Learning to read is divided into two main skills: Decoding and Comprehension. When we are first learning to read we only focus on decoding, the act of figuring out what word the letters on the page assemble to make. However as we begin to get better and better at decoding, the texts we read begin getting more complicated and we need to develop our comprehension skills as well. Comprehension skills are about being able to understand what the words on the page mean, what the text is trying to say, learning to retain memory of what is happening over longer texts.

Writing

While we are continuing to write about a various science experiments this week, some writers in Mr Horn's class have also begun learning about writing narratives. They are learning about characters, settings, and events. They will need to develop skills around descriptive writing, structuring a story with a beginning, middle and end, and learn how to use speech marks correctly. 

Maths

Mr Horn's maths class has been learning about geometry and 2D and 3D shapes. We learned what the parts of a shape are called (face, side, corner, and angle) and learned the names of a variety of 3D shapes such as cubes, spheres, pyramids, and prisms (of various kinds like triangular, pentagonal, hexagonal, octagonal, etc). We also had a lot of fun turning 2D pieces of paper into 3D shapes by cutting, folding and gluing together 3D shape nets. Come into Room 19 sometime to have a look!

Topic

In technology we have begun building and designing towers and paper helicopters. 

For the towers we were using whatever materials we could to try and build as tall a tower as possible, changing the design and materials along the way.

For the helicopters we made a standard paper helicopters. Then we had to gather the data about how long it stays in the air, we did this by dropping the helicopter from a set hight three times, and timing how long it takes to touch the ground. We used a calculator to add these times together and divide by 3 to get an "average" time for how long it takes to fall. Next week we will be making changes to our designs to try and make them stay in the air longer, we will then time and drop them again.

PE

We learned a new game this week to develop our kicking and fielding skills. We divided into two teams, a kicking team and a fielding team. One at a time the kicking team would come up and kick a ball as far as they could, they would then run around two cones, earning a point for their team each lap. Meanwhile the fielding had to get the ball back to the start position but could not run with the ball. We learned a lot about fielding, how you have to work as a team, that it is not all about being the one to touch the ball but being able to work together to get the ball back as fast as possible. The next step to this game is to add two more balls.

What's Coming Up

- The entire Year 2 teaching team are on CRT on Monday and wont be in class

- Mr Horn is on ICT release on Tuesday

- Ms O'Loughlin is on Leadership release on Thursday