Dear Parents and Guardians,

I’m thrilled to present myself as Emma Hatch, taking on the 2EV teaching role during Elizabeth’s maternity leave. Over the past five weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of teaching 5KF and immersing myself in the wonderful community here at Holy Family.

Fresh from teachers college last year, I come with plenty of enthusiasm and dedication for the teaching role. I eagerly anticipate the opportunity to nurture and guide your children through the teacher transition and remainder of the school year. Additionally, I am excited to forge strong connections with the families of 2EV students, as we collaborate to cultivate a safe, enriching, and vibrant learning environment for the year 2s.

Kind regards,

Emma

emma.hatch@holyfamily.catholic.edu.au

Maths

This week we looked at patterns, we started to explore what we already know about patterns before we learn more about them.

We also looked at problem solving using multiplication and place value.

We worked on the problem below…

Science

During Science we continued to look at mixtures, we investigated different mixtures we come across on a daily basis, what they are made up of and how we can find out what they are made up of.

Religion

During Religion we discussed how God wants us to do the right thing. We read a book about a boy who made many wrong choices. We explored his wrong doings and corrected them by recording what the right thing would be to do in those situations.

Health

During Health we discussed places and people who make us feel safe, we recorded what our safe places would sound like, look like and feel like, we then drew a picture of our ideal imaginary safe place.

Reader’s Workshop

During Reader’s Workshop we further investigated what we had been learning during Writer’s Workshop and recorded the beginning, middle and ending of our chosen narrative book.

Writer’s Workshop

During Writer’s Workshop this week we discovered what a setting is and how we can discover the settings in the books we read as well as writing about the setting in our own books. We discussed how a setting tells us the time and place of what is happening in our story, the words could tell us and sometimes the illustrations can give us the information we need about the setting of our story.

Science

This week we continued our investigation into mixtures.

We first revisited last weeks prediction about what certain ingredients would look like once mixed together.

We tested the experiment for ourselves and mixed the three separate mixtures together to test our predictions.

After we created a map about mixtures and investigated when we might use them, where we might find them, why we might make them and how they might feel or look.

Writer’s Workshop

This week we continued our author study into Nick Bland. We discussed text type, and discovered that he always follows a narrative structure when writing his books. We discussed how narratives always follow the same structure – a beginning – which tells us the who, what and where, the middle which always has some kind of a problem and the end where there is some conclusion made, the problem is either solved or not solved and the story ends.

We read ‘The Very Brave Bear’ and after we analysed what the beginning, middle and ending of the story was.

Religion

In Religion this week we talked about the three requirements God has of us….

To act justly, to show mercy and to walk humbly.

We discussed what the three meant and created presentations which show represented our understandings.

HASS

In HASS this week we had a look at how the Indigenous Peoples make stories. We talked about how they use symbols to represent words.

We then looked at many of their symbols and what they mean.

We watched an Indigenous Australian create a story using the symbols, she discussed why she chose to use each symbol and what her story meant.

The children then had a go themselves, writing words on the back of their symbol pictures to articulate their stories.

Word Study

In Word Study this week we continued to look at suffixes, particularly the suffix ‘ing’. We recapped on how last week we learnt that the word has a base and a suffix and we practiced separating the two. We also talked about how the base alone, (eg jump) has one meaning but when we had the suffix ‘ing’ and change the word to ‘jumping’ the meaning of the word changes.

This week we practiced turning the words into word sums, (eg. jump +ing = jumping) we then followed by turning our word into a sentence.

Mother’s Day Crafting

On Friday the children used their creativity to create a card for each and every one of their mothers. They were very engaged in this activity and all put in as much effort as they could for their mums.

Happy Mother’s Day Mums of 2EV. You are all doing an amazing job! Each and every child in our group is wonderful, and we all know that mums play a big role in creating these wonderful children.

I hope you all enjoyed receiving your gifts and cards from the children today.

Science

This week in Science we started a new topic! This Term we will be looking at mixtures.

We made three predictions about what we thought three separate lots of  substances would look like once they are mixed together.

Next week we will get to see for ourselves and see if our predictions were right.

Religion

In Religion we recapped on what we learnt last Term about Jesus.

We learnt about Jesus and the many kind things he did for others. We learnt that Jesus was a teacher, a teacher who showed us how to live as God intended us to.

He showed us how to be kind to one another, how to care for one another, how to love one another and how to include every one. Jesus never left anyone out. No one was better than anyone else.

We read a book about kindness, we then reflected on what acts of kindness look like.

The children were given agency in the way they presented this work. Some chose to write it out, some chose to make a book using paper or their laptop, some chose to make a poster, some used their laptops to photograph acts of kindness and some used their laptop to film themselves acting out acts of kindness.

Writer’s Workshop

For the first half of this Term we are doing an author study. The author we are studying is Nick Bland. We will be exploring his many different picture books and studying his crafting techniques, we plan to use them in our own writing.

This week we read The Very Cranky Bear. We focused on Nick Bland’s use of Big and Bold to exaggerate some of his words and add expression to his writing. We talked about how it is kind of similar to using an exclamation mark.

As with all Writer’s Workshop lessons children are given agency. They can write books about whatever they like and if they want to they can have a go at including some of the things they have learnt during the mini lesson.

Numeracy

This week we had a look at number lines. The children engaged in a series of number line challenges using their laptops. They had to fill in the missing numbers to a range of different types of number lines some which did not start at 0, some which included numbers in the 100s, and others that skip counted by 2, 5, 10 or sometimes 50.

Jazzabelle and Sebastian had a go at creating a number line and then had a go at filling in the missing numbers on the number lines.

HASS

In HASS we are learning about communication – different forms of communication and the most effective ways of communicating.

After discussing the many different forms of communication we know. The children were tasked with the job of creating a party invitation to their imaginary dream party. The children had to decide which method of communication would be most effective before creating their invite in that way. Some created an email, some created a card, others created a poster and some created a text message.

HASS

This week, we started a research project on a continent of our choice, we used Google and YouTube to source information about our continent and used the information in our presentations.

Writer’s Workshop

We continued to be authors and create our own books.

Word Study

We continued to learn about vowels and consonants, we had a look at the names of the students in our class and we colour coded the vowels and consonants.

Maths/HASS

We learnt about maps. We learnt how to use google maps to find certain places in Adelaide and we learnt how to used directional language to explain how to get from one place to another.

Welcome to Week Ten.

Maths

During Maths we have been discovering the value of the number zero, and learning that zero is not actually ‘nothing’ and it is a very valuable number

Writer’s Workshop

A focus for Writer’s Workshop this week has been on punctuation and learning how to use punctuation in our books, which will help the reader know how we want them to read our book.

Art

The children used their creativity to turn an egg shape into something that wasn’t an egg.

Literacy/Health

We read a book called Olympig, which is about a pig named Boomer, who didn’t win any of the events at the Olympics. He did not let that get him down! He was there to have fun and try his best. The children answered a range of comprehension questions and applied the situation to how we will be good players on Sport’s Day.

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Welcome to Week 9 2EV, Week 9 was a week full of Religious Education opportunities being Holy Week, where we recognise the story of Easter and the events that took place in the lead up to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.

We started the week on Monday, the day after Palm Sunday, remembering the celebration of Jesus entering Jerusalem.

The children recreated the story in the form of a digital illustration using Pixel Art.

We continued the week discussing the events that took place after Jesus entered Jerusalem, including, when Jesus entered the city temple and expressed his anger with how others were misusing the house of God, to the Festival of Passover where Judas expressed his jealousy, to the last supper where Jesus washed his disciple’s feet, to Judas ordering the Guards to arrest Jesus, to Jesus being ordered to crucifixion, to the Stations of the cross.

As a class we went through the stations of the cross in great detail, discussing what happened as Jesus carried the cross to the top of the hill where he was nailed to the cross and where he eventually died.

It was important for the children to understand that while the beginning of the week was full of celebration for Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, the end of the week was full of sadness for Jesus’ death which took place on Good Friday. Children learnt that Easter eggs and activities do not occur before Jesus’ resurrection which occurred on Easter Sunday.

As a class we discussed why we receive eggs on Sunday – because they symbolise new life, in the same way Jesus has a new life.

On the Thursday morning the children attended a Liturgy for The Last Supper.

Maths

We continued to work on our place value and renaming numbers.

In

Writer’s Workshop

And in Writer’s Workshop we continued to explore our creative writing side.

HASS

We also learnt about the seven different continents and drew a labelled map of the world.

Welcome to Week 8’s learning. As you know I spent three days absent last week, while I recovered from my injury. I was back on Thursday where I caught up with the children and the learning I had left them while I was away.

Writer’s Workshop

Harmony Day

Children talked about the meaning of Harmony day and read the book, ‘I’m Australian Too,’ which is a book about how we all, from different cultures live together in Australia as one.

The children then made their own I’m Australian Too poster.

Har

Religion

St Joseph’s Day

St Joseph was a wonderful, patient man who was the earthly Father of Jesus and the loving husband of Mary.

First the children participated in a Liturgy about St Joseph, then engaged in an inquiry into who he was. They all created a presentation about St Joseph.

Religion

Palm Sunday

Today we shared the Bible scripture which tells us of Jesus entering Jerusalem on his donkey, where he was celebrated with much excitement, as people waved palm leaves in the air.

After, the children created their own palms for our window display.

This lesson was taught on Friday in preparation for the Sunday before Easter Sunday where this event took place

Hi Families and Students,

I apologise that week seven’s post has not been posted sooner. I had an accident last weekend and hurt myself. I was not at work for a few days, which has caused me to fall a bit behind.

Here we are, all caught up, I’ll have week eight’s post up very soon as well.

Writer’s Workshop
Let’s start with with our Literacy. The students have continued making their books, and their imagination has been shining through with the variety of books and genre types that I am seeing.

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We tried something new this week! We started a little task which we will continue with as the weeks go by. The learning intention for this activity was for children to continue to learn how to extend their writing stamina and eliminate/control distractions around them, in addition to learn how to choose a topic and stick to writing about the one topic.

I asked the children to think of a topic, any topic at all. I then asked the children to wait at their desks with a piece of lined paper, and a sharpened pencil.

Once everyone was set, I set a ten minute timer on the screen for all to see. Once the timer started each child began to write about their topic, everything they could think about in relation to their topic, without stopping. They could not talk or walk around, they had to be writing. They had to have a go a spelling words they were unsure of and put a line through any mistakes they made and keep writing.

We did this a few times throughout the week and the idea was that each time they tried to write more than they did the previous time. Each time they had the choice to either, keep adding to what they had written last time or start a new topic.

Have a look at our first attempt.

ZANE

Here is our second attempt…

Maths

During Maths the children continued to learn about place value. Each of the children created number stories for their chosen numbers.

Religion

In Religion we read the following scripture…

Mark 10: 13-16

Jesus blesses the children

13 People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them.14 When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.15 Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”16 And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them.

The children then reflected on the following questions…

Health

As you know, we have been talking a lot about what bullying is, why people might bully, how it makes others feel and how we can be a good friend. During this week we looked at what we can do if we are getting bullied, or if we notice someone else getting bullied.

The children then made a ‘how to book’ about ‘how to stop a bully.’