AIS - Grade 2

This week has been super busy in Grade 2. We have been working on UOI so the children learned about different peacemakers. We read about Greta Thunberg and they learnt how to summarise information about her. Learning how to do this is still quite a new skills for the grade 2 students.  The children had to choose a peacemaker from a shortlist of names and research why that person is important. It could be an environmental activist, an anti-poverty activist or a human rights activist.  As a formative assessment, they had a few days to research and work on a poster about their person of choice.  For literacy, we looked a little more at prepositional phrases and a new topic: homonyms (words that are spelled the same and sound the same but have different meanings) and revised homophones and homographs).  In math, the students revised how to read time and do word problems related to time as I noticed some students still can't read time very well. They also learnt a new skill of adding an

 This week we looked more into our UOI central idea about people and conflict. I asked the children to think about conflict that might happen out in public, such as people not driving or riding safely so they crash into each other. Aiko had a story of a time she was on the train and a man wasn't wearing a mask, so a passenger asked him why he wasn't wearing one. The man got angry and the train driver had to come and ask everyone to leave the train and deal with this man and the police. So we discussed how these people could have reacted in a more peaceful way to avoid conflict.  We had a guest English lesson taught by Murty and Fatma (grade 9 students) about describing words. They showed the children some text that children in grade 5 wrote that showed nice describing words and the passage was giving clues about what the text was about. Using the clues, the children had to guess that the first passage was about "something that became very popular around the world in 2020.|

 Hello and apologies for the missing blogs recently. I hope you enjoyed the photos on Seesaw at least. This week grade 2 started a new unit of inquiry (UOI) related to the transdisciplinary theme: Sharing the planet .  Our central idea is: People's response to conflict impacts the quality of human life. We spent this week breaking down the words. We started by talking about how people share the planet and how this can be difficult in terms of sharing the resources of the planet.  For e.g. What is conflict? How do we see it in daily life and in the world? What is quality of life? We did an activity about needs and wants and discussed what is absolutely essential for a child to have a good life.  We also talked about peace. Is peace just the absence of war? If I am a child and I don't get 3 meals a day and don't have enough clothes but I live in a rich country like Australia, am I really living a peaceful life? On Thursday we watched a short animation about Sadako Sasaki, th

Last week the class looked at the final line of inquiry for this unit of inquiry: Explorers' and Indigenous peoples' views of exploration. Using a Venn diagram, students worked in small groups to see what the differences were, and if there were any views that might be the same. Some children were able to identify that both groups encountered danger or fear of the unknown people they met, as well as the challenges of surviving in  difficult weather conditions.  They identified that the explorers who stole land gained a lot whilst the Indigenous tribes had to decide to fight, make a deal or flee. The summative assessment for the unit was introduced and explained to the class. They need to create a booklet from the perspective of an explorer or an Indigenous person. Students can imagine they were a real explorer such as Magellan or a real Indigenous person like Sacagawea.  More details were posted on Seesaw. For math, the class worked in pairs and did sorting activities with analo

 This week the children finally got to go to the park and release all that pent up energy. Did that mean they were less talkative in class? Absolutely not! During our UOI lessons we have continued to look at how Native Americans have dealt with a long history of being treated unequally in Northern America. We listened to a few children's stories on Youtube based on real stories of Indigenous people who were taken away from their families and sent to live in 'boarding schools' or 'residential schools'. We also read a children's book about how the Native American tribes joined forces to resist European occupation but that after 300 years of resistance, sadly, they lost and accepted treaties. I showed the children videos of ceremonies such as Pow Wows and the girl's coming of age ceremony in a Native American tribe. We also drew pictures of Indigenous people in their special dress. Today they researched a tribe of their choice from anywhere in the world, and as

Hello and welcome back to the new term. I'm sure you enjoyed saying goodbye to your child on Monday. The children are slowly getting back into the routine. We welcomed our new student Aiko to the class as well! This week our new Unit of Inquiry was introduced: Human exploration has positive and negative effects on people and the planet. It is part of the transdisciplinary theme: Where we are in place and time.  We looked at exploration in a few ways such as the hiking of Mt Everest by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, the importance of the Amazon rainforest to our planet, and the Great Barrier Reef. We had a little look into some older explorers like Marco Polo too. We also did an activity using cardinal directions and a map. Today we were able to use the gym for PSPE so they definitely burnt off a lot of energy. The children did revision of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and fractions this week, as well as some English grammar and reading comprehension.  Many chi