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Grade 2 Parent Curriculum Guide

Reading

Your child will:

  • Create and answer questions to show an understanding of key ideas and details in a text
  • Summarize portions of a text to identify a main topic or central idea and key details
  • Describe how characters respond to major events and challenges
  • Describe the connections between ideas, concepts, or a series of events
  • Explain how specific words and phrases express feelings, appeal to the senses, or determine the meaning of content-specific words within a text
  • Describe the overall structure of a text (beginning, middle, end)
  • Identify examples of how illustrations, text features (e.g. captions, headings, bold words), and details support our understanding of the text
  • Demonstrate understanding of story elements 
  • Compare and contrast key points or perspectives presented in two texts; recognize that texts reflect one’s own and others’ culture

Writing

With guidance and support, your child will:

  • Produce writing in which the development and organization is appropriate to task and purpose
    • Opinion text:
      • Write an introduction that names the topic
      • Write the opinion
      • Write reasons that support the opinion
      • Use linking words to connect opinion and reasons
      • Write a concluding statement or section that restates the opinion
    • Informative text:
      • Write an introduction that names the topic
      • Write facts and definitions to explain the topic clearly
      • Write a concluding statement or section that restates the most important information
    • Narrative (events real or imagined)
      • Write a lead
      • Write details to describe actions, thoughts, and feelings
      • Write events in order 
      • Use transition words (first, next, then, however, further, after, before, as a result, etc.)
      • Provide a sense of closure

Foundational Skills

Your child will:

  • Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds (phonemes)
    • Add, delete, and substitute individual sounds (phonemes) in simple one-syllable words to make new words, including initial, final, medial, consonant blends, short vowel sounds, and long vowel sounds
  • Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words
    • Distinguish long and short vowels when reading regularly spelled one-syllable words
    • Know spelling-sound correspondences for additional common vowel teams
    • Decode and encode regularly spelled one, two, and some three syllable CVC pattern words (e.g., 1 syllable: mat, 2 syllable: picnic, 3 syllable: fantastic, etc.)
    • Decode words with common prefixes and suffixes 
    • Decode regularly spelled two-syllable words with long vowels and encode some of these words 
      • Know when to drop the final e when adding an -ing, -ed endings (silent-e vowel pattern base word)
      • Know when to double the final consonant when adding a suffix. -ing, – ed. 
    • Recognize and read grade-appropriate irregularly spelled words
  • Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension 
    • Read grade-level text with purpose and understanding.
    • Read grade-level text orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression on successive readings
    • Use context to confirm or self-correct word recognition and understanding, rereading as necessary

Speaking and listening

Your child will:

  • Participate in collaborative conversations with peers and adults in small and large groups
    • Actively listen, take turns, gain the floor in respectful ways, and stay on topic
    • Build on others’ talk in conversations by linking their comments to the remarks of others
    • Ask for clarification and further explanation as needed about the topics and texts under discussion
    • Consider individual differences when communicating with others

Mathematics

Your child will:

  • Demonstrate the use of addition strategies to 100
  • Demonstrate the use of subtraction strategies to 100
  • Mentally add numbers up to 20 using a variety of strategies
  • Mentally subtract numbers up to 20 using a variety of strategies
  • Understand place value of 3-digit numbers
  • Count within 1,000 by 5s, 10s, and 100s
  • Read, write and compare numbers within 1,000 using symbols (<,>,=)
  • Mentally add or subtract 10 or 100 to/from a given number within 1,000
  • Explain answers using addition and subtraction strategies using math vocabulary
  • Measure and estimate lengths to using standard measurement
  • Compare measurements
  • Use addition and subtraction within 100 to solve word problems using measurement  
  • Create number lines with correct spacing for whole numbers
  • Tell time to the nearest five minute and identify a.m. or p.m.
  • Solve word problems using dollars, quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies
  • Reason with shapes and attributes including partitioning shapes into equal shares

Science

Your child will engage in science and engineering practices to explore:

  • Earth’s surface
  • materials and their uses
  • plant and animal survival

Social studies

Focus: Culture and communities of the world

Your child will:

  • Understand the diversity of communities and cultures
  • Describe problems faced by various communities and cultures
  • Identify potential sources of conflict between cultures and possible solutions to these problems
  • Explain how land formation, climate and natural resources influence the location of communities
  • Develop a strong sense of pride in their local communities and an appreciation for communities unlike their own
  • Identify reasons that communities and cultures are diverse
  • Use reference tools
  • Apply map and globe skills

Music

Your child will:

  • Sing, alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music
  • Play, alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music
  • Read and notate music
  • Listen, analyze, describe and evaluate music

Art

Through drawing, painting, sculpture and printmaking, your child will:

  • Identify and begin using the art elements in their projects
  • Be introduced to a variety of artists, art styles, and art movements throughout history
  • Begin to understand that art is created by all cultures
  • Create art that expresses their feelings and communicates their personal ideas
  • Develop basic skills and techniques necessary to produce projects
  • Explore a variety of media
  • Be introduced to art vocabulary and demonstrate their understanding of it

Fitness education

Your child will:

  • Understand and apply the components of health-related fitness to achieve and maintain a healthy lifestyle
  • Develop and maintain appropriate levels of skill-related fitness
  • Develop understandings so that they can adopt healthy and physically active lifestyles
  • Develop positive attitudes about physical activity so that they engage in healthy and physically active lifestyles

Classroom guidance

Students participate in classroom guidance activities facilitated by a school counselor.  Each school provides a developmental guidance curriculum that encompasses dealing with feelings, peer relationships, decision making, protective behaviors and careers.  Skills taught will assist each child in his or her academic, emotional and social development.  This, in turn, will help ensure success in school, at home and in the community.

Social and emotional learning

  • Growth mindset & goal-setting – students learn how to develop a growth mindset and apply research-based goal-setting strategies to their social and academic lives
    • This unit’s content helps create classrooms that are connected and encouraging by helping students set and achieve collective and personal goals and learn from challenges and mistakes
  • Emotion management – students learn how to build their emotion vocabularies, practice identifying their own and others’ emotions and recognize the importance of labeling and processing their emotions
    • This unit’s content helps students understand and explore how past experiences as well as unique perspectives influence how they feel and respond to situations
  • Empathy & kindness – students learn how to recognize kindness and act kindly toward others, and how to develop empathy by learning strategies to take others’ perspectives
    • This unit’s content helps students understand others’ points of view
  • Problem-solving – students learn how to process strong emotions, describe a problem, identify the wants and needs of others, think of and explore the outcomes of potential solutions, and pick the best solution
    • This unit’s content helps students ask, listen and empathize with all parties involved during problem-solving