Week 2 Term 3

Welcome back to Term 3!
I can't believe we have been back for a whole week already!
It seems everyone had a lovely holiday break, be it either overseas and up north soaking up some warmth or some lovely time at home relaxing and spending precious family time together.  All the children have come back refreshed and ready for some more learning and fun!

Homework
Homework will continue as normal this term.  Please ensure your child is reading every night including ten minutes aloud to an adult to help develop expression and fluency (home or school book).  This is also a great opportunity to discuss new vocabulary and punctuation features.
Mental maths books Days 1 to 4 completed by Fridays.  We also encourage nightly spelling of your child's phonic spelling list in their blue Look, Say, Cover, Write and Check mini-folder.  Please try to also include three or four extra tricky sight words to spell each night (these should be the sight word practice words noted on a letter if your child is still participating in the sight words program up to Year 3 words).   Please feel free to come and see us if there are any concerns or questions about homework.

Prayer Assembly
Just a reminder that our Prayer assembly is on Friday morning of Week 4! We will be joining with 2T for this assembly.  Our focus will be God's love.  No costumes needed :)

Learning Area focus for Term 3
English
PLD spelling groups will continue for the next four weeks and students will be retested towards the middle of the term.
Our reading focus this term will include finding answers in the text and determining if questions are literal (in the text) and inferential (think about it). We will be working on our comprehension skills by strengthening our use of the following strategies: text connection, visualisation, prediction and text features.  We will continue our focused reading groups which allow each group to target and practice specific strategies and areas of need.
In writing we will focus on persuasive texts for the first half of this term, building our understanding of persuasive text structure and language features.  Our class will investigate and try to develop our use of emotive language to help convince and persuade our readers to agree with our point of view.  We will also begin to develop our understanding of paragraphs, writing multiple sentences about a mini-topic, idea or reason while ensuring our sentence starters are varied to keep our reader's interest and attention.
Our grammar focus will also include understanding parts of speech (adjectives, nouns, verbs and adverbs), use of commas for a list of items, lengthening our sentences using conjunctions (for, and, so but, or, because) and including capital letters for proper nouns.

You may have also noticed us joining on the mat quickly in the mornings to enjoy a picture book as the first thing of the day at 8:45.  We are currently participating in a challenge to read 100 books by the end of the year (roughly one a day) known as #classroombookaday .  Research has shown so many benefits from frequent read-alouds and we are loving just enjoying listening and reading good quality short stories and beginning the day with an imagination jolt, creativity and noticing some WOW vocabulary words.  A display of what we have read  together and tracking our progress is coming....

Religion
The two units that we are covering this term is Empowered to Love (Love and confirmation) and Jesus Forgives (Vocation and Penance)
Maths
We have begun this term learning about multiplication and next week will be division.  We have introduced the symbol 'x' and spoken about what this can represent.  In Year 2 the concept of multiplication and division is deeply studied, looking at the purpose of this operations and problem solving multiplication scenarios.  We have learnt the relationship between multiplication, equal groups and repeated addition and this week we are starting to learn about arrays, number lines and how skip counting relates to multiplication.  It is just as important that your child has a strong understanding of what multiplication (and times tables) mean, the different words and vocabulary fo 'x'  and the parts of a multiplication sentences in addition to their ability to recite multiplication facts.  Please note that we encourage parents to assist their child to learn the 2x, 5x, 10x (and often 11x) by the end of Year 2 and we will we learning more about about the 'times tables' in class in Term 4.
Science
This term we are focusing on Earth and Space Science, learning about Earth's resources including a specific focus on 'water'.  We will discuss and research uses of water, the water cycle, where does water come from and any other questions that the students generate themselves.  We will be combining with 2T to work collaboratively to learn about this precious resource.  We had a brilliant first lesson today learning together, working in small groups to create a team name, brainstorm our current knowledge about water and create wonder questions and water interest topics for the term.  Photos to come soon!

Please come and see us anytime if you have any questions or queries.
We are looking forward to another wonderful term!
Penny and Kristy

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