Welcome to the Second Grade Home Page! Second Grade is a busy year where the students have much to learn and enjoy during our active and eventful days. Please check back often to watch our progress throughout the year.

Central to every child's learning experience is to instill in them the love of reading and writing. Please take time to listen to your child read every night. If reading and writing are natural activities for your family, your second grader will want to join in on the fun.

In second grade our approach to teaching reading is a balance between guided and independent reading. We reinforce the students' ability to decode words while helping them to read for meaning.We expect that by the end of second grade, students can maintain independent, silent reading for 20-30 minutes.

Some of the units that we cover in second grade are: mysteries, non-fiction and author studies.

In writing we use the Lucy Caulkin's writing curriculum. This model asks the students to write about the experiences in their own lives. We write "small moments" - personal experience stories that zoom in on events that have happened in students' lives.

We also teach the students' to reread their writing and edit it. We expect the students to use capital letters and punctuation correctly.

The units that we cover are: Launching the Writing Workshop, Small Moments:Personal Narrative Writing, Writing for Readers: Teaching Skills and Strategies, The Craft of Revison, Authors as Mentors, and Non-fiction Writing: Procedures and Reports.

We use the Pinnell and Fountas Word Study Program. This program works with letter/sound relationships, spelling patterns, high frequency words, word meanings, word structure and word solving actions. We do whole class instruction in these areas. From our word study lessons each week, students develop individual spelling lists.