Weekly update (what's on, learning concepts and how you can help) - please read

Hi everyone,

What’s on this week:
Tuesday 22^nd October: Parents Alison Kealy and Matt Duckham from Melbourne University Engineering department visited the neighbourhood for the second time to explore mapping and puzzlement.

Wednesday 23rdth October 9.10am: Book Talk

Wednesday: Pyjama day (gold coin donation)

Friday 25^th October 1:15pm: Year Two has Talent Time

19^th-27^th October: Children’s Week http://www.childrensweek.org.au/

20^th-26^th October: Water Week http://www.sawater.com.au/interactivehouse/

Forthcoming:

Thursday 6^th November: Tabloid Sports begins 9am-11am

Wednesday 13^th November: walking excursion to Engineering Department, Melbourne University

Learning Concepts:
The children will be finishing their autobiographies and we will be asking if any parents could spare a little of their time to help type them up in the next couple of weeks.

Our Inquiry is taking a new turn – toward mapping! Our major conceptual understanding and question is: “what constitutes knowledge?”  Exploring maps from the past and present show that knowledge is contextual and is set in time and place. We have puzzlement and questions about the world which leads to investigations and research, which then develops our knowledge of the world. This week we are exploring different types of maps, why we use them (to make sense of our world, to record our knowledge, to pass on information to others etc.), and how we can use them. Workshops for Learning Agreement will include mapping our thoughts and feelings through artistic expression, using Atlases and grids, categorising maps, scaling up and down, exploring non-fiction texts about mapping, exploring how indigenous people mapped, and producing other types of maps like timelines, mind maps, diagrams etc.

The children continue to be read Pippi Long Stockings and a daily serial and are developing vocabulary, reading and comprehension strategies by responding to these texts through discussion, illustrations, and reflections in their reading logs.

Buddy Reading is continuing this term where Year two children buddy up with a year one child and they read together for 20 minutes on Tuesdays after Assembly.

The children are working in target concept groups in number, developing their conceptual understandings of place value, addition and subtraction, multiplicative thinking and number patterns and investigations.

The children are trying out reciprocal reading whereby they lead their own guided reading groups, taking on the roles of summariser, questioner, clarifier and predictor.

Spelling Investigations this week include the sound ‘oo’ (made by ‘ue’, ‘oo’, ‘u_e’, ‘ew’, ‘ou’, ‘u’, ‘oe’, etc). Please help your child to discover some of the words that have unusual letter combinations that make this sound.


How you can help:

Please return your forms for both Tabloid Sports and 1-1 computing that your child should have given you last week.

Please let one of the Neighbourhood teachers know if you would be free to help type some autobiographies in the next couple of weeks.

Please donate to the bazaar hampers by putting items in the baskets outside of the Year Two Neighbourhood.

Encourage your child to use Mathletics at home to practice their basic number facts, to improve their fluency in mental calculation and to challenge themselves. Your child has their mathletics password in their reader’s and writer’s notebook.

Also have a look on http://www.puzzlechoice.com for some fantastic puzzles that incorporate mathematics and literacy. Click on the ‘Kids Choice’ button down the side to explore them. You have to print the puzzles to work on them.

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.

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.