2022 – Grade 2
Language
We’ve spent a lot of time reading 100’s of books over the year, continuing the slow progress made over the last few years.
In the twilight months of 2022 we started reading ‘The Terrible Two’ a quadrilogy by Mac Barnett that Emily really took to.
With The Terrible Two series read Emily tried a new series called ‘Diary of a Wimpy’ Kid by Jeff Kinney and this is where our breakthrough happened, a single reading session at the start of the second book saw her sat by herself and nearly 40 pages read because she was enjoying it. Reading has been our bottleneck in Prep, grade 1 & 2 and after three years & we are as close to fluency as we’ve ever been.
Emily is now reading book two and looking forward to the rest of the series.
We’ve practiced our spelling by playing games of HangMan,writing messages to both Nan & Granma on the Tablet and practical things of that nature.
Our handwriting has taken a bit of a back seat this year at home, but that hasn’t stopped Emily writing some short stories, or short messages of love to the entire extended family.
MATHS
We’ve had another good year of progress with Maths, progressing well past what the school environment has offered and moved into some long division, basic algebra, geometry & currency.
In a limited fashion we have applied these fundamental skills around the home to solve real world problems as they arise. We have continued to use our prefered ‘Speed Maths’ technique of rolling dice to create endless random problems with addition, subtraction, division & multiplication as needed.
STEM
Science has been fun this year, we’ve looked at the Macro & the Micro of our world.
We’ve taken out Emily’s Telescope & looked closely at some of our Solar System, the Moon, Mars & Jupiter in particular. In the micro we’ve used Emily’s Microscope to look at hairs, leaves, water born life, insect wings and talked about how evolution has slowly adapted each things to best suit it’s ever changing environment.
We’ve continued building project kits and built projectors, potential energy machines, kinetic machines, light boxes, split light, touching on all sorts of fascinating concepts in the engineering world.
We’ve continued to develop our reasoning skills with programming robots, playing logic games like adult cluedo, battleships, connect four, Master Mind etc.
We joined a robotics club at out local library and have tried a dozen or so new robots in audition to our own EmilyBot (Lego Spike Prime) which we’ve programed to tell the weather, differentiate between different colours and a few other interesting builds.
We’ve built lots and lots of lego over the year, recently a Space Shuttle with an interesting Tensegrity mount which allowed us to see how things like rope or wire work differently in compression and tension.
We’ve had talks about the basics of the physical world like, Energy, conservation of energy, it’s different forms and such, we’ve touched on basic Chemistry though this has just been to pre seed some simple understanding for a closer look in 2023.
We’ve started our own Hydroponics Lab and grown from seed, cucumbers, capsicum, tomato, lettuce, basil and we have a few other things we’d like to try, we’ve seen how the seeds sprout, what their root systems look like, seen how different environments effect the growth rate of of identical plants and used that as an analogue to discuss how our own environments effects us and our development.
Arts & Craft
It’s been a lovely year for arts and craft, Nan took Emily under her wing this year and done some Cross Stitch & Quilting which Emily has taken very well to, we combined arts and science this year and made some of our own clay, refined from mudstone. The clay itself turned out very well, but we all need some more practice with the moulding, drying and firing before we have anything useful to show for our endeavours. Emily has been painting a bit this year, some drawings but a lot of her outward expression has been building with Lego where she has created some amazing scenes, though I haven’t apparently taken any photos of these.
Practical LIFE Skills
Kitchen Time has been the driver of so many learnings this year, maths, reading, food science, safety, first aid, life skills, experimentation, the list just goes on and on.
Emily has really taken to the kitchen and we’ve baked, fried, kneeded, frozen, smoked, brined & cured so many things. Cured our own Ham & Bacon, made Bread, Quiche, pastas & pizzas, portioned whole Chickens, made fruit bread, ice cream, sushi, casseroles and crumbles.
We’ve used additive and subtractive weighing techniques, tried our hand at estimations of wet and dry ingredients, looked at volume & density, observed different food science reactions, played with temperature and all the while helped feed the family and developed some life long skills.
Out & About
We’ve been and done all sorts this year, Swimming, Scouting, Digging in the Yard, visiting some hobby farms with goats & horses, attended a First Aid course & watched a presentation about crazy Food Science.
Emily even marched in her own Anzac Parade because she was so proud of her two uncles.
