Plurals and Science

In spelling today, we learned about plurals. A plural is a word used to describe more than one of something. For example, the plural of dog is dogs and the plural of box is boxes.

Sometimes we need to just add an "s" to a noun to make it plural, but sometimes we need to add "es". It can be tricky to know which to do, but we found an easy way that works with most words!

After sorting lots of words and looking carefully at how they're spelled, we discovered that words that end with s, x, ch and sh all need es added to make them plural. Most other words just need an s added. We should be able to remember that and it'll make spelling plurals easy. There are some exceptions to the rule, such as calf becoming calves, but we'll learn about those another day!

We've been working on some interesting art this week. After writing recounts of our holidays, Mrs N took photos of us posing like we were doing something we wrote about in our recounts. We then cut ourselves out of the photos and drew a background for them. It was fun to do and we think they look really interesting.

Brydie playing Wii Bowling

Stephany on a giant jumping pillow

Julie getting her cast off at the doctor's

Jacinta with the crayfish she caught

This term, we're learning all about water. In Science today, Miss J helped us do an experiment to test which substances dissolve in water. Dissolving means that it becomes completely mixed in with the water. She gave us some cups with cold and warm water in them and things like sugar, coffee, tea leaves, glitter, sand and salt. We mixed them with both types of water and observed what happened. We noticed that some things dissolved and some didn't.Sugar, salt and coffee all dissolved easily, especially in the warm water. The tea leaves dissolved a bit and turned the water brown, but there were still bits floating around. Glitter and sand didn't dissolve at all!

Tea leaves in warm and cold water

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

A New Term

We're back from holidays and the new term is looking busy already!

Danica and Jenaya had particularly exciting holidays because their mums both had a baby! Jenaya's new little brother is named Craig and Danica's little sister is Eirinn. We've had a peek at them both and they're gorgeous!

Jenaya and Craig

While new babies are pretty exciting, the other Smarties had good holidays too! Some of us went swimming, ten-pin bowling, to watch a soccer match, or performed in dancing concerts. Julie and Anastacia finally had their plaster casts removed too! We've written recounts about our holidays and you can read some of them on our class writing blog.

We're very lucky to have Miss J, a student teacher, in our room this term. We're really looking forward to all the exciting lessons she has planned for us. She's already been teaching us about some new shapes, like rhombuses and hexagons. Today, we drew animals using a shape as part of the body.

 Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

100th Day

Today was the 100th day of being in Year 2! We celebrated with some activities about the number 100.

Mrs N modified a shopping catalogue so that all the foods were whole dollars, with no cents. We needed to write a shopping list that totaled exactly $100 and we could choose anything we wanted. It was pretty fun to imagine doing some shopping! We used a calculator and tally marks to check our totals.

Another activity involved counting 100 objects and then weighing them, so we could compare how much one hundred of each thing weighs. We counted and measured popsticks, matchsticks, cotton balls, cotton tips, grains of rice, straws, plastic tiles, feathers, counters, plastic teddies and lots of other things. We discovered that 100 grains of rice were the lightest and 100 plastic teddies were the heaviest.

Finally, we began writing 100 words. Our classroom is full of useful words, so it was easy to find enough, but we ran out of time! Maybe we'll get to finish it tomorrow.

Our 100th day of Year 2 was great fun!

 

 

 Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

NAIDOC Week

This week is NAIDOC Week, which is a time when we celebrate the culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We spent the morning doing all sorts of fun things! Our guest speaker brought in some bush tucker, which is food that traditional Aborigines gather from plants to eat. We tasted Muntharis, Dumbari and Bunya Bunya.

Some of us painted our faces, not with paint, but with ochre mixed with water! We tapped rocks together to get dust from them and then stirred in enough water to make a paste. We used our fingers to make dots and lines on our faces.

We also got a chance to play a didgeridoo. These are musical instruments made from the hollow trunks of trees. Traditionally, only men and boys can use them, so the boys were allowed to use the real didgeridoos. The girls weren't left out though! They played didgeridoos made from bamboo instead. We had to keep our lips loose and blow raspberries into the end of the tube to try to make a noise. This video shows what it's supposed to sounds like. It was hard, but lots of fun!

 Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Tints and Shades

In Art this week, we learned about tints and shades. A tint is a colour you get by adding white to some paint and a shade is when you add black. A tint is lighter than the original and a shade is darker. We learned how to draw cubes using a square piece of card. It was easier than we thought it would be! We then used our original colour to paint the front of the cube, the tint to paint the top and the shade to fill in the side. The combination of colours helps our cubes look three-dimensional. We can't wait to experiment more with mixing paints next term.

We've been doing some more learning about homophones. Miss H gave us lots of magazines and asked us to find pictures of things whose names can be homophones. We created a poster to display in our classroom.

It's almost the holidays, which means that we're just about at the end of our unit of work about Australia. Elise's mum brought us a poster from the post office which has pictures of some new stamps that are being released this week. They have drawings of Australian animals on them. They inspired us to design our own postage stamps! We needed to choose either an animal or a landmark that we had learned about and we drew them with a postage stamp border. Real stamps have the word "Australia", the name of what is drawn on them and the price of the stamp. We made sure we included all that information on our stamps too.

Koala

The Three Sisters

Western Swamp Tortoise

Uluru

Our visit to the zoo a few weeks ago really made us think about animal habitats and the animal homes we saw there. In class, we were given the challenge of designing an enclosure for an animal of our choice. We needed to use our knowledge of zoos and our knowledge of animals and think about their needs and wants to design a perfect enclosure. We drew then on paper first, labelling all the main parts, then we borrowed the blocks and plastic animals from Pre-Primary and created a zoo in our classroom!

We received letters from our Skype buddies, 2MK in Victoria. It was great to read about what they learned from us about our state.

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Golden Wattle

The Golden Wattle is the national flower of Australia. It's a really beautiful plant that has bright yellow flowers that look like little, fluffy balls. This week, in art, we drew some golden wattles using oil pastels on black paper. We think they turned out really great!

In English, Miss H has been teaching us about homophones. These are words that sound the same, but have different spelling and different meanings. Understanding homophones can help us with our spelling! Some of the examples we've been learning about are:

hear - I can hear a noise.

here - Come over here, please.

two - I have two pencils.

to - I'm going to the supermarket.

too - I'd like an apple too.

there - Look over there!

their - That is their dog.

they're - They're going to the movies.

right - The car turned right at the lights.

write - I need to write a shopping list.

which - I wonder which one he will choose.

witch - Jane dressed up as a witch for the concert.

Here's a homophones quiz, where we can test our knowledge!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N

Zoo and Skyping!

Mrs N has been extra busy writing lots of nice things about us in our Semester 1 reports, so she hasn't had time to update our blog for a while. Lots has been happening!

Last Friday, we all hopped on a bus and travelled to the Perth Zoo. When we arrived, we carried all of our lunches to the grassed area and had our morning snack. After that, we went off in groups of three or four, with a parent helper and we visited as many animals as we could! There was a special section just for Australian animals, so most of us headed there first. We saw kangaroos, emus, quokkas, echidnas, wombats, dingoes, cockatoos, wallabies and numbats, which are many of the animals we've been learning about in class! We also saw lots of snakes and lizards, nocturnal animals like possums and bilbies, as well as animals from other countries, like lions, sunbears and otters. It was a fantastic day!

This morning, we Skyped with 2MK in Victoria. Their class is learning about Australia this term too, so our teachers organised to video chat so that we could teach each other about our states. We asked each other lots of interesting questions and we learned some new things about Victoria.

• Their state animal is the Leadbeater's Possum.
• Their state bird is the Helmeted Honeyeater.
• The aquatic emblem is the Weedy Seadragon.
• The body of water closest to Victoria, is Bass Strait, which is a channel that sits between Victoria and Tasmania.
• People in Victoria are crazy about Australian Rules Football (AFL) and they invented the big competition that now has teams from most of our states competing in each season.
• The Victorian flag looks like this:

Victorian State Flag

Tamarillos

Our Monday Munchies food this week was a really pretty fruit called a Tamarillo. None of us had ever tried one before and at first, we didn't know what it was. It had a smooth, dark red skin and was shaped like an egg. We thought it looked a bit like a passionfruit and a bit like a tomato. When Mrs N cut into it, we could see lots of seeds and pulp, a bit like a tomato. In fact, tamarillos used to be called tree tomatoes, so our guess was pretty good! We used spoons to scoop out some of the seeds, pulp and flesh and we all had a taste. Some of us came back for seconds and thirds, because it was so delicious!

Stephany has some gorgeous new glasses. Her eyes had been getting sore, so her mum took her to the optometrist, who is someone that checks eyesight. He said she needed glasses, so Stephany picked the ones she liked and the optometrist put the right sort of lenses in them. Now her eyes shouldn't get so sore and she looks great too!

Love from The Smarties and Mrs N