Open Art Morning

Posted on November 30, 2016 by lisasporn

This morning all of the Year 2 classes were open for our families to visit and see all of our latest artistic creations. It was lovely to have so many parents, grandparents brothers, sisters and cousins visit. Each student used the brochure they’d prepared for the tour and took their visitor around the room explaining all of the creations we’d made as a part of our Inquiry topic.

What was your favourite part of having visitors to our classroom? Why?

Ride A Bike

Posted on November 29, 2016 by lisasporn

We’ve been doing Ride A Bike activities for the last 3 weeks. On Tuesday morning the team comes into the class to teach us specific riding skills, road safety rules we need to know and skills to ride a bike safely.

We’ve loved working with the team of teachers and our bike riding skills have really improved a lot.

We’ve worked on:

riding a bike with no trainer wheels
how to wear your helmet properly – with the straps done up properly
tucking laces and long pants into sock – if needed
riding and always looking up and around – check what happening around you as you ride
how to pass a pedestrian on a footpath – using bell and voice as a warning
how to ride slooooooowly along footpaths and checking driveways in case of reversing cars
how to ride 2 abreast along a path and pass oncoming riders – making sure we stayed on the left side of the path – NO crashes!
braking quickly in an emergency.

It’s been a lot of fun learning lots of these safety strategies and we’ve all become a lot more confident when riding our bikes.

Mannequin Challenge

Posted on November 22, 2016 by lisasporn

screen-shot-2016-11-22-at-8-28-16-pm Today as our class set up for our Daily 5 Listen to Reading session we started off with something a bit different!! We love to listen to stories using our iPads, iPods, laptops and computers. We listen to stories from Sunshine Online, Ziptales, Storyline Online and some different book apps.

It’s really important to listen to reading because:

it gives us ideas about how to read using expressive voices for characters
it shows us how to pronounce words
we listen to the speed or pace of the reading (steady, faster, slower paces as needed)
it can teach us how to sound out difficult words
it gives us examples of how to read fluently.

We also have some people doing read to self today because they’re reading books that they just LOVE.

Today we started Listen to Reading by doing the ‘mannequin challenge’. This viral video trend is where people remain frozen in action, like a mannequin. We’re sure you’ve all heard of it – well now you can see how our class does it!

https://youtu.be/TGIrMhCANZA

What do you think of our Mannequin Challenge? Did you see the students from the class next door watching us – they just couldn’t resist.

Coding with Bee Bots

Posted on November 20, 2016 by lisasporn

Our class has been using the Bee Bots as a part of developing our ‘coding’ skills. We have a set of Bee bots that can be programmed to follow a sequence of steps to move along a set path. This is a very simple but highly effective way to start teaching children to code.

Our iPads also have the Bee bot coding apps and we also use Scratch for students to further engage in coding activities. Some of the older students in our classes like to use Python, Raspberry PI to code as well. Many of these students come along to our weekly Coding Club sessions on Fridays. Of course, one of the most popular coding programmes is Minecraft – we all LOVE to use Minecraft!

We use coding as just 1 way of developing many different skills. Coding develops:

procedural steps planning – sequencing
creative
collaborative
communication
critical thinking
problem solving
perseverance
counting
planning
testing and re-testing strategies
ways to work safely on the Internet.

There are many other skills that could also be listed. There are also many different ways student can continue to develop these coding skills that will lead to many jobs for in the future.

These photos and clips are from Friday’s session – we had a great time trying to programme and test our instructions for the Bee bots. We used the masking tape to set a path for our Bee bots to follow (hopefully).

*** Please note some of the wheels on our Bee bots aren’t tracking properly and wander a little off the path.

https://youtu.be/hI7G3Wdfw84

https://youtu.be/FXWHTp5u_34

https://youtu.be/B5WCcSxXo7M

https://youtu.be/NfDJfr3w5Dw

https://youtu.be/ji0VFRc5BPM

What was your favourite part of our Bee bot coding session? What do would you plan for our next session?

Sports Expo

Posted on November 17, 2016 by lisasporn

Today we had our annual Sports Expo. This is a wonderful chance for us to learn about new sports that we may not have tried before or practise new skills in sports we’ve played.

Our stations were:

athletics – relays, shot put, hurdles, ball skills.
basketball – played a game of golden child.
wheelie sports – learning how people use a wheelchair and why they might need a wheelchair.
gymnastics – lots of stations with a different focus: climbing, balancing, swinging, rolling, flipping, jumping, bouncing, crawling…the list goes on.
cricket – ball skills like throwing, catching and playing as a team.
air gym – lots of different bouncing skills and making shapes with our bodies.
soccer – skills like kicking, passing and team games.

We’d like to say a huge thank you to Mrs Pettman for organising the whole day – we had so much fun learning lots of new skills.

Music is Fun Band

Posted on November 10, 2016 by lisasporn

Today our school hosted the Music is Fun band. They were absolutely fantastic and we all LOVED the concert! We sang, danced and some of our class even turned into sheep.

We’ve been learning lots of the songs and actions to songs in our Music lesson with Mrs Rayner. We heard a great variety of songs and really enjoyed lots of them. It’s also great to learn about the different instruments used in the concert – how they are played, what sounds they make and different ways they can be used.