Dear Parents,
Tonight you will receive a green notice regarding a 1-1 Macbook Information Evening on 16th October 4:30-5:30pm.
Please send back the RSVP at the bottom of the notice if you would like to attend. It needs to be returned by 8th October but this week would be preferable. There is no need to return the slip if you cannot attend.
Please see Simone if you did not receive a green notice.
Have a wonderful evening.
The Year Two Neighbourhood Team
Tuesday 17 September 2013
Saturday 14 September 2013
Puzzles in the art work of Escher
http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/gem-projects/maa/0203-2-03-Escher/main3.html#Translation
For me it remains an open question whether [this work]
pertains to the realm of mathematics or to that of art.”
- M.C. Escher
What do you think? What makes you think that?
For me it remains an open question whether [this work]
pertains to the realm of mathematics or to that of art.”
- M.C. Escher
What do you think? What makes you think that?
Friday 13 September 2013
English learning experiences
Students bring with them to school a wide
range of experiences with language and texts. These experiences are included in
the curriculum as valid ways of communicating and as rich resources for further
learning about language, literature and literacy. Throughout the inquiry exploring
‘Our impact on culture’, students engaged with purposeful listening, reading,
viewing, speaking and writing activities for different purposes and contexts.
English and the “Divercity” Group
Excursions and Guest Speakers
At ACMI in the 75-minute
program, clips and short films were screened to help students
understand narrative structure and the importance of stories. This
experience included the work of Shaun Tan.
It aimed to promote positive self-esteem and appreciation of people, places and things that are important. It stimulated discussion about what it means to be part of a family, focusing on roles, cultural backgrounds, celebrations and traditions.
It aimed to promote positive self-esteem and appreciation of people, places and things that are important. It stimulated discussion about what it means to be part of a family, focusing on roles, cultural backgrounds, celebrations and traditions.
At
CERES the students were absorbed in ‘hands on’ activities with a focus on
sustainability.
Through
the talk by an anthropologist, children learnt about his work with a focus on
life and culture in Papua New Guinea.
Research
1.
What
is a Flag?
The first thing that we did was talk a
lot about what a flag is. We asked lots of questions like:
What are flags? Where did flags come
from? What are flags used for?
We discovered that a flag is a symbol
for a country and can tell you things about the country that it represents.
Then we looked at lots of flags from
around the world. We noticed that most flags have a symbol on them. Flags are
very colourful. Most flags have only a few colours. Flags can be lots of
different shapes: rectangles, squares and some are triangular.
2. Our
country’s culture
We started to think about
creating our own flag. We looked at the South African Flag and the Aboriginal
Flag of Australia and thought about what the flags tell us. We realised that we
needed to find out more about Divercity before we could make decisions about
how our flag would look. So we had a conversation with the whole Inquiry group
about the culture of Diversity, what we would like our country to be like and
what we would need to have in it. We came up with a very long list of values
like Multiculturalism, Sustainability, Friendship, Respect for Nature, Love and
Freedom. We also decided that Divercity would be an island nation, in the
middle of the Coral Sea because it is warm there and it is close to Australia.
3. What
is a symbol?
We talked about what a symbol is and
thought about how we could represent all of the values that we had discussed
with the rest of the Inquiry group in our flag.
We thought about what colours could be used to show those values, like
blue can represent Freedom because the sky is blue and the sky has no
boundaries. A yellow sun could represent warmth and warmth can represent
friendship.
We researched symbols of
multiculturalism and sustainability and discovered that the best symbols were
the simple ones.
We experimented with different colours
and symbols by making paper flags and discovered that our shapes had to be
simple enough to be easily cut out of paper (and later fabric).
4. Keep
it simple, make it meaningful.
We talked about the differences between
good and bad flags. Good flags have no more than five colours, no more than 2
charges (shapes or symbols), no letters or numbers and can be easily recognised
from a distance. We came up with 2 rules to follow:
Keep
it simple
Make
it meaningful
We decided to choose a few important
values to work with and a few strong symbols: a leaf, a sun and a blue sky, and
chose 4 colours: blue, green, red and yellow.
5. So
many ideas!
Working with the limited symbols and
colours, we tried to put those symbols together in as many different ways as we
could think of. We came up with 31 different ways! To decide which design we
would make, we each chose 2 of our favourites and the Inquiry group voted for
the final design. We were a bit surprised by the one that the group chose- it
was one that we had all created together.
6. Sewing
the flag
The design that the group chose didn’t
have a sun in it and we all felt that the sun symbol was an important one so we
added a sun. We also added another colour, orange so that the sun and the leaf
could be distinct from each other. Taking turns to sew the main flag using a
sewing machine, we slowly put our flag together. While waiting for our turn at
the machine we each made a smaller flag in our favourite designs. Sewing took a very long time but was really
fun.
7. Flags
can be powerful
‘It’s easy at the start to
think of ideas but it gets harder when you have to make something’
‘You need no more than 5
colours’
‘Deciding which design to
use was hard’
‘Simple is hard’
Constitution
Group and the Celebration Group
Researched constitutions and listened to each other using interaction skills, including initiating ideas,
making positive statements and voicing disagreement in an appropriate manner,
speaking clearly and varying tone, volume and the children varied the
constitution sentence beginnings.
Sim
City Group
Together, the
children were assisted to address real global challenges such as climate
change, the search for renewable resources and natural disasters. They decided how
to collaborate to shape the world of tomorrow.
The National Anthem Group
The children were scaffolded to Identify,
reproduce and experiment with rhythmic, sound and word patterns in poems,
chants, rhymes and songs. The whole group talked about a play on words from
diversity to Divercity.
Research Viewing Reading Writing
The children viewed films on the use of
plasticine and learnt about scale and perspective from artists. They read books
about famous buildings throughout the ages.
All the children created short imaginative
narratives, informative and persuasive texts using growing knowledge of text structures and language features
for familiar and some less familiar audiences, selecting print and multimodal
elements appropriate to the audience and purpose. They
composed an invitation, wrote explanations, reflections and justified their
thoughts.
For the celebration and display, students published their composed texts, created images to support
the meaning of the texts. They accurately spelt
familiar words and attempted to spell less familiar words and used punctuation
accurately. They legibly wrote unjoined upper- and
lower-case letters when publishing.
When learning the songs “We are
Australian”, “Man in the mirror” and the original composition “Divercity”, the
students used comprehension strategies to build
literal and inferred meaning and began to analyse texts by drawing on a growing
knowledge of context, language and visual features and print and multimodal
text structures.
The children continuously shared their work
with each other throughout the process of this inquiry.
Monday 9 September 2013
Communicating 'what's on' in the Year Two Neighbourhood
Good Afternoon to our lovely Year Two Families,
After having some conversations with parents in the neighbourhood, we have decided to try and keep you 'in the know' a little more with what is happening in the neighbourhood. We would like to offer you opportunities to be involved and share with you the major concepts we are working on with your children so that you can stimulate discussion at home as well.
We will endeavour to make this a regular update and we welcome feedback on any other aspects of your child's school experience that you would like more information on. There are three sections: What's on this week, learning concepts, and how you can help.
What’s on this week:
Tuesday 10th September: Sharing our Inquiry learning with teachers and students from Singapore and seeing some of their learning experiences.
Wednesday 11th September 9.10am: Book Talk
Friday 13th September 1:20pm: Year Two has Talent Time
Learning Concepts:
The children have been introduced to the images of Shaun Tan’s work and we will continue to study his work as an author and illustrator.
The children will be exploring poetry to use rhyming words to explore spelling and sound patterns.
The children are being read Kumiko and the Dragon and Pippi Long Stockings as a daily serial and are developing reading and comprehension strategies by responding to these texts through discussion, illustrations, and reflections in their reading logs.
The children are working in target concept groups in number, developing their conceptual understandings of place value, addition and subtraction.
The Learning Agreement has been focused on portfolio pieces of work in the various areas of learning including publishing narratives, reflections on our Inquiry celebration, demonstrating their mathematical development, and reflecting on and setting new learning and personal goals.
The children are entering a new Inquiry into Puzzles and puzzlement. We are in the initial stages of exploring ‘what is a puzzle?’, ‘what are the purposes of puzzles?’, and ‘Is puzzlement the same as a puzzle and the same as a problem?’
How you can help:
Please assist your child to type their narrative at home if this is a possibility.
Please help your child to borrow and return from the junior school library in the mornings, there is a new borrowing system whereby a parent volunteer should be available to help your child scan in books from 8.50am-9am.
Please come along to Book Talk on Wednesday Morning, parent involvement is so important to us and the children love sharing books with families. Parents who attend read a story to a small group of children and discuss the book with a particular focus in mind.
Parents are invited to next week’s assembly on Tuesday 17th September to hear Nicola and Deb’s lunchtime choir perform.
We are commencing an author study into Shaun Tan. There is currently an exhibition on Shaun Tan’s ‘The Lost Thing’ at ACMI that you may be interested in visiting with your child.
Please note that school finishes at 2.30pm on the last day of school, next Friday 20th September.
After having some conversations with parents in the neighbourhood, we have decided to try and keep you 'in the know' a little more with what is happening in the neighbourhood. We would like to offer you opportunities to be involved and share with you the major concepts we are working on with your children so that you can stimulate discussion at home as well.
We will endeavour to make this a regular update and we welcome feedback on any other aspects of your child's school experience that you would like more information on. There are three sections: What's on this week, learning concepts, and how you can help.
What’s on this week:
Tuesday 10th September: Sharing our Inquiry learning with teachers and students from Singapore and seeing some of their learning experiences.
Wednesday 11th September 9.10am: Book Talk
Friday 13th September 1:20pm: Year Two has Talent Time
Learning Concepts:
The children have been introduced to the images of Shaun Tan’s work and we will continue to study his work as an author and illustrator.
The children will be exploring poetry to use rhyming words to explore spelling and sound patterns.
The children are being read Kumiko and the Dragon and Pippi Long Stockings as a daily serial and are developing reading and comprehension strategies by responding to these texts through discussion, illustrations, and reflections in their reading logs.
The children are working in target concept groups in number, developing their conceptual understandings of place value, addition and subtraction.
The Learning Agreement has been focused on portfolio pieces of work in the various areas of learning including publishing narratives, reflections on our Inquiry celebration, demonstrating their mathematical development, and reflecting on and setting new learning and personal goals.
The children are entering a new Inquiry into Puzzles and puzzlement. We are in the initial stages of exploring ‘what is a puzzle?’, ‘what are the purposes of puzzles?’, and ‘Is puzzlement the same as a puzzle and the same as a problem?’
How you can help:
Please assist your child to type their narrative at home if this is a possibility.
Please help your child to borrow and return from the junior school library in the mornings, there is a new borrowing system whereby a parent volunteer should be available to help your child scan in books from 8.50am-9am.
Please come along to Book Talk on Wednesday Morning, parent involvement is so important to us and the children love sharing books with families. Parents who attend read a story to a small group of children and discuss the book with a particular focus in mind.
Parents are invited to next week’s assembly on Tuesday 17th September to hear Nicola and Deb’s lunchtime choir perform.
We are commencing an author study into Shaun Tan. There is currently an exhibition on Shaun Tan’s ‘The Lost Thing’ at ACMI that you may be interested in visiting with your child.
Please note that school finishes at 2.30pm on the last day of school, next Friday 20th September.
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