April 22nd is the official date of Earth Day and today second class learned all about the theme of this year’s Earth Day “Invest in the planet”.
We learned that this could mean investing our time, energy and resources into making the earth a better place to live.
We made promises to the earth on what we would do to invest in the planet!
We came up with some great ideas check them out here.
Well-being week is off to a great start in second class!
We started the week by making our well-being choice boards. We have been using these throughout the day and letting one person choose a well being activity for the whole class from their choice board. So far we have had some extra movement breaks, arts and crafts and some Pokémon drawing!
We have also been enjoying our 5km running challenge. We have run a kilometer a day so far. We figured out that if we ran 5km it would be like nearly running all the way to Sandymount beach!
11 laps of our playground is 1km!
by Friday we will have run 5km!
We have lots more fun activities planned for our well-being week and are enjoying it a lot so far!
Second Class have been learning about the abstract artist Jackson Pollock.
We learned all about his famous drip painting technique and got to try it out for our selves. It was messy but a lot of fun!
Like real artists we came up with names for our pieces and labeled them! 
Next we moved on to using the Jackson Pollock inspired methods to create a “Crazy Hair” piece. We drew and designed the body and to create the hair we used straws to blow water colours in all different directions.
We are very proud of our finished pieces!
Second Class have been working so hard the last few weeks on creating their very own stories.
We started by creating the main character for our story.
Next we moved on to designing our story setting some of us even created two settings.
After that we thought of our Problem and Solution and finally we moved on to our story plan.
There was great creativity and imagination happening in our room and now we are working on creating our very own books. Stay tuned for their release in the new year!
Enjoy this video of our writing process!
Second Class
Second Class had fun thinking about and designing a jumper for Ryan Turbidy for tonight’s Late Late Toy Show.
We also learned about the history of the Toy Show and how it has been airing for 47 years!
Each year has a theme and we made a few predictions about what tonight’s might be!
Our favourite parts to learn about were the performances, the special guests and of course the toys!
Second class had a lot of fun learning about time last week. We became very secure in the concept of how long a minute is.
We estimated how long it would take us to do certain things in 1 minute. Some of the things we estimated were how many jumps we could do, how many times we could run the length of the yard or how many long steps we could take in one minute.
It was a lot of fun and we got fresh air and exercise while practising our counting skills, our estimation skills and developing our understanding of time.
We have had a busy 8 weeks in Second Class with lots of learning and lots fun!
In English we have nearly finished two full novels! We have read George’s Marvellous Medicine and are almost finished The Twits, we have used these novels to develop skills such as prediction, character description, persuasive writing, rhyming and more! We can now confidently use adjectives, verbs and adverbs in our writing. Check us out here working in our groups to brainstorm adjectives to describe those terrible Twits!
It was lovely to finish off our Maths learning this term with Maths week. We had a lot of fun playing maths games in the morning to practice our skills such as skip counting, patterns, place value and 2D and 3D shapes.
In Art this term we have been looking at the artist Picasso. He is from Spain and his very first word was pencil! We have been learning all about his style of art known as “Cubism”. We have created our own Picasso style Cubism masterpieces!
We have been working very hard on our spelling skills this term. To improve our phonological awareness we have been using counters in our English Stations to count the sounds in our words. We count the sounds using counters before we write and then spell the word carefully. It has been working really well!
Finally in Learn Together we have been looking at recycling and plastic use. Check out our posters we made in pairs to remind ourselves and our school community to reduce our plastic use where possible.
This is just a snippet of the amazing learning happening in our class and there is much more to come!
We are looking forward to a week of rest before kicking off the second half of term 1!
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
Once a month we complete a STEM challenge to stretch our learning.
In September we completed the Paper Chain Challenge. Everyone was given the same materials: a piece of A4 paper, a scissors, and a glue. The challenge was to create the longest possible paper chain.
We had to think about what was the best approach to this challenge – long strips? Wide strips? Big loops? Small loops? We problem solved as we worked and ended up with some very long paper chains!
Second Class started a new unit on Shape today.
We refreshed our knowledge go 2D shapes by going on a shape hunt around our school.
We found out that rectangles were the most common shapes in our school and hexagons and pentagons were the least common.
We will keep our eyes peeled for 2D shapes in our environment in school and out of school this week.
