Yr2 Weekly Update – 09/9/16
We have been delving deeper and deeper into the concepts of community, systems, cooperation and organization this week.
The children have been using their analysis skill to try and spot features of communities. So far we have noticed that communities often share ideas and understandings. Sometimes communities are made up of people from the same place, but not always and we now know that technology can let people from all over the world be members of communities together.
We continue to look for and then deconstruct systems in our everyday lives. We are quickly coming to understand that systems are everywhere! From the way we set a table for dinner to the vehicles and roads that get us to school each day, systems are the things that solve everyday problems and allow things to happen. When we are taking systems apart we find that they are sometimes made up of other systems! This is a big understanding and something that grown-ups might like to chat about at home. One of the fun things we have done this week is address the issue of broken systems. Usually people see “broken” as being a bad thing but we have been working on seeing it as an opportunity. A broken system is like a puzzle, it can be fixed, which is great, but often the break leads to new ways of thinking about the system and it isn’t just fixed, it is improved. We improved some of the shared area systems by separating different construction sets so that all the components in a box worked together, meaning there was more time to be creative and have fun!
Place value is still our maths focus and it has been interesting this week to notice how place value is actually a system, allowing us to arrange digits in a way which represents larger and larger numbers. We have noticed that bundling items together into tens helps to organise the items into easily countable groups. It also separates the sets of 10 and the units. This is the same as putting numbers into different columns
Finally this week we continue our work on word and sentence level development. We are concentrating on using our phonics based strategies to decode new and challenging words while trying to learn our camera words by sight. Sentence building is dependent on simple success criteria which we have created together, small things like starting with a capital letter, using “and” to join ideas and ending with a full stop, question mark or even exclamation mark. By writing sentences and then checking against these criteria we are able to recognise success or easily improve our writing.
A great week from everyone which we will no doubt build upon next Monday and Tuesday.
The Year 2 Team
