Our Amazing Excursion and Fantastic Family Mass

March 25, 2017

Wow! What a week we have had in Year 2H!

We started the week with Rainbow Sock Day to raise awareness for Down Syndrome. As well as having happy feet on this day, we also completed some counting activities with Mrs Martin and decorated our own pair of socks to make our class display. The display can help us count by twos (across the rows) or 10s (down the columns).

We also started to collect Easter Egg donations for our whole school Easter Raffle in Week 10. Thank you for your generous support! Raffle Tickets were sent home during the week. Please return ticket stubs with your child’s name on them along with $1 a ticket to the office please. If you would like to purchase more tickets they are available at the office. All money raised from the raffle is added to our Project Compassion fundraising for the Term. We are continuing to collect donations for the raffle this week. Please place items in the basket in the classroom.

On Wednesday we set off on our incredible excursion to the Busselton Jetty Underwater Observatory. We had a magical day of learning about the History of the Jetty through viewing and trying to draw artworks by local artist Jack Bromley and through listening to our tour guide, Jess, tell us lots of interesting facts. We saw many incredible creatures and all picked our favourites! We were also lucky to time our excursion to see the last schools of anchovies swim through the bay and the first schools of salmon arriving! Other highlights were the train ride out to the observatory and playing on the fantastic foreshore playground. It was such a fun day of learning experiences! Thanks to our parent helpers on the day, Sandy(Taya’s mum), Mandy(Zayne’s mum), Anna(Jordy’s mum), Caroline(Laura’s mum) and Brendan(Austin’s dad).

On Thursday we wrote recounts of our excursion and many children reached their writing goal so will receive their new goal next Thursday during our Writer’s Workshop. Thanks to Sherylee(Tara’s Mum and Shantell(Charlie and Max’s Mum) for assisting the children during our workshop this week!

On Friday we used the Busselton Jetty website to learn more about the history of the jetty and also find the fish species that we observed. We mixed blue, green, white and black to create different shades for our underwater paintings. We used the fish finder to take a closer look at the shapes of the fish we found and drew three of the species. Thank you to our parent helpers Bruce(Jaz’s dad), Prue(Sian’s mum) and Marylee(Ebony’s mum) for making this research and art session possible! Keep your eyes spied to see the artwork up in our classroom soon!

If you would like to explore the “Fish Finder” with your child to see what they saw on our excursion, the link is, www.busseltonjetty.com.au/marine-research/fish-finder/ We saw mainly “Bony Fish” so search under that option.

Finally, we rounded off Week 8 on Saturday night with our Year 2 Family Mass. Thank you to those families that attended. Father Ian shared a special message in his homily about the "inside" qualities of a person being more important than the "outside". Lent is a time to reflect on how we are treating others and try to spread good thoughts and deeds through our words and actions. Mr Wilkie was very proud of our class for achieving this in the playground this week. The children's "Mass Manners" were also to be congratulated!