Our reading curriculum includes systematic and explicit instruction in lessons in reading aloud, partner reading, comprehension, and vocabulary, followed by time to practice skills taught, conference with teachers, and reflect and set goals. In second grade, daily oral language development is practiced through language activities and skills practice. Beginning in second grade, the emphasis shifts from foundational phonics to word analysis, the study of word structure and vocabulary development. Fluency skills, comprehension strategies, and writer’s craft are a focus in second grade. Text skills and comprehension strategies taught through fiction and non-fiction: cause and effect, classify and categorize, compare and contrast, fact and opinion, main idea and details, making inferences, sequence, asking and answering questions, clarifying, making connections, predicting/confirming predictions, summarizing, and visualizing. Students are assessed through weekly reading assignments/tests. Teachers also give benchmark reading assessments to evaluate a student's word accuracy, fluency, and comprehension for text leveling at the beginning, middle, and end of year, along with the STAR Reading Test- a computer adaptive assessment that measures key aspects of a student’s knowledge of reading and language. The STAR reading test is given at the beginning, middle, and end of the year and it is used to help understand a student’s strengths and needs in reading.
Accelerated Reader is another digital enrichment program that students may access. Student’s may choose a book from the AR list of books, read it at his/her own pace, and then complete a quiz on the book. Points are awarded based on the number of questions answered correctly. The points accumulate to reach milestones and awards. Students are assigned individual goals based on their reading levels.
Through our writing curriculum, second grade students learn the writing process- brainstorming, drafting, editing, revising, and publishing. Grammar, usage, mechanics, and spelling remains a crucial part of the ELA portion of each lesson. Students are introduced to different types of writing including the friendly letter, persuasive, narrative, expository, and descriptive writing.
The second-grade writing units are written with seven-year-olds in mind. These youngsters are chomping at the bit for something new. They feel very big now and want work that feels big and important. That’s what they’ll get—this series invites second-graders into author studies that help them craft powerful true stories, science investigations and lab reports, and finally, into some very grown-up writing about reading. Across the writing genres, children learn to understand—and apply to their own writing—techniques they discover in the work of published authors. In Lessons from the Masters: Improving Narrative Writing students learn how to create engaging narratives by stretching out small moments and writing in detail. Unit 2, Lab Reports and Science Books, uses inspirational nonfiction texts to help students design and write about experiments and other scientific information. Unit 3, Writing About Reading, has students read closely and gather evidence from texts to craft persuasive arguments. The final unit, Poetry: Big Thoughts in Small Packages helps children explore and savor language. Students learn to use line breaks to express the meaning and rhythm they intend and use visualization and figures of speech to make their writing more clear and powerful.
Through our math curriculum, Progress in Mathematics, students explore concepts in place value, addition and subtraction, geometry, fractions, multiplication and division, measurement. The approach used builds deep conceptual understanding of key math skills and concepts at a developmentally appropriate level. Skills taught: addition and subtraction facts, place value to 1,000, data and graphs: using operations, two-digit addition, two-digit subtraction, geometry, money and time, three-digit addition and subtraction, fractions and probability, measurement, multiplication and division, and problem solving.
In second grade, students become scientists as they observe, classify, and record data collected through science investigations. The core areas of the second grade science curriculum include: animals, plants, matter, forces and motion, weather, and more! They learn about the world around them through studying about our world through social studies concepts.
