AIS - Grade 2

 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