It has been a challenging start to Term 2 with lots of illness and people away.  Last week we had most people returned and it felt like we were settling back into our rhythm again, which has been wonderful.  As our Fables main lesson was interrupted by our bumpy start to term, we are keeping it alive by retelling the animal fables using shadow puppets.  Some Class 2 children are interested in performing their shadow puppet fable, so stay tuned for more! 

We have had pet visits in Class 2, timed to coincide with our Animal Fables main lesson.  Last week we met Benedict's cat Mandy who is nearly 170 years old in cat years!  Mandy was very calm and quiet and we had to keep our voices soft so as not to startle her.  The week before we met Charlie's dog Pickles, a much younger soul and a very energetic kelpie who was keen for lots of action and excitement!  The children really love our pet mornings and we love fostering these home/school connections.

Class 2 children have been enjoying practicing our recorder songs.  We've been inspired by children in our class who practice karate out of school, to organize our recorder songs into levels of challenge.  We have established six "Recorder Karate" belt levels for songs requiring more complex notes and levels of mastery.  This has been a great motivator as well as supporting the life-long lesson of regular practice being how we improve.  Have you heard that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in something?!  That's a lot of practice. 

Speaking of practice, in handwork the children have been finishing their 7-coloured rainbow balls to master their pearl stitch.  As they finish their rainbow balls they are moving on to begin their gnomes.  A very exciting Class 2 project!

Last week we started our Place Value mathematics main lesson.  The children had the challenge of counting all of our maths gems.  This required sorting them into groups of 10s and 100s to finally get to our total of 1341 gems.  The children worked really well together throughout this challenge.  We will be continuing to work on place value over the coming weeks with lots of hands on counting and number work.