Curriculum
Reading:
Last year, as a first grader, your child was introduced to a structure called the Daily Five. The Daily Five is a literacy structure that teaches independence and gives children the skills needed to create a lifetime love of reading and writing. We will continue to use the Daily Five structure in second grade. During Daily Five time, children will engage in five main tasks: read to self, read to someone, listen to reading, work on writing, and word work. At the beginning of the school year, we will work on building comfort and stamina with these five tasks. As students become fully engaged and independent with the tasks, I will be able to regularly meet with small groups and individual students during Daily Five time as well.
Orton-Gillingham:
We will be using a program called Orton-Gillingham for our literacy instruction this year. This is a research based, systematic, explicit, multi-sensory, code-based approach to decoding and spelling instruction. The most noticeable change will be in the way we assess spelling. Under this program, the focus is on learning and applying specific spelling/phonetic patterns, rather than memorizing a weekly list of words. Therefore, the only words we will send home will be the week's "Red" words, which will be a set of high frequency words that do not go along with the week's phonetic focus skill. The spelling test at the end of the week will be composed of words that follow the pattern practiced in class that week.
Math: 2nd Grade math standards focus on:
1. Operations and Algebraic Thinking (focus on addition, subtraction, and foundations of multiplication)
2. Number and Operations in Base Ten (focus on place value and adding/subtracting within 1,000)
3. Measurement and Data (focus on length, time, and money)
4. Geometry (focus on two dimensional shapes and the foundations of area and fraction models)
Writing:
Lucy Caulkins Writing has come to CHVE!
Here is the “Reader’s Digest” version of our new writing program. Lucy Caulkins is a very well known, teacher, writer, and researcher extraordinaire. We have looked to Lucy for writing guidance for decades and now we are going to formally implement her latest program. Here is a rundown of what writing will look like in second grade…
- Improving Narrative Writing- The kids will learn how to create narratives by stretching out small moments. Our wonderful first grade team has used this program in the past so your kids already know how to write “small moments”.
- Improve Informational Writing- The kids use nonfiction texts to help design and write about experiments and other scientific information. This portion of our lessons will be taught using science notebooks.
- Improve Opinion Writing- The kids will work on “close reading” and gather evidence from texts to craft persuasive arguments. They will also do a lot of responding to text in their interactive journals.
The kids will explore various forms of poetry. They will learn about how figures of speech make their writing clear and powerful.
Other Major Second Grade Units:
- Community/Neighborhoods
- Plants and Animals
- Mysteries
- Earth Science - Air and Weather
- North America
- Fairy Tales
- Iditarod
- Balance and Motion
- South America