Grade Two
Language Arts
Speaking, Listening and Memory Skills. Given oral presentations of stories up to 20 minutes in length and a 24-hour interval, students will recall the main sequence and details of the story. Stories will include legends, fables and nature stories. Students will also create drawings and/or paintings depicting scenes from the stories. Given activities and games (such as “Simon Says”) with increasing degrees of difficulty, students will increase their abilities to stay in the game, thus developing auditory discrimination, depth and sequencing. Given oral practice and stage directions, students will perform plays before an audience (minimum: 2 per year). Given tongue twisters and sequencing exercises designed for practice in pronouncing specific sounds, students will perform the exercises with clarity in a group. Movement and gestures will often be used to help in these exercises. Given poems, students will chorally recite the poems with good diction, meter and expression. Selected poems will be performed in front of audiences at assemblies.
Writing/Spelling Skills. Given an oral story, students will help compose a synopsis. The teacher will print this synopsis on the board, and students will copy it and create illustrated books. Students will decrease their writing size over the year and increase their accuracy and neatness. Cursive writing will be introduced in the first semester. Given examples written on the board, students will properly include initial capitalization, capitalization of proper nouns, periods, commas, quotation marks and question marks. Given an imaginative story and examples, students will master writing and recognition of lower case letters. Given oral and written statements and questions, students will discriminate between statements and questions. Reading Skills. Given lists of word families, students will develop a book or folder in which they spell the words which are given to them orally by the teacher. Children will learn to categorize words according to word families and spelling rules. Given common sight words, basic reading vocabulary words, practice and review, students will print dictated sentences with accurate spellings. To increase receptive language skills, students will be read stories at least three times per week, and be told stories at least two times per week. Given teacher and student created storybooks based on classroom activities, and curriculum-appropriate readers, students will develop basic skills in word recognition, comprehension, fluency, intonation, and expression as well as work in level-appropriate smaller groups. Given phonics, principles, games, practice and review, students will identify sounds for letter combinations and develop word-attack skills in “sounding out” words. Given reading classes, students will exhibit “approach” behaviors (excitement over reading periods, favorable comments, quick formation of reading groups, and reluctance to stop reading). Given a basic eye screening, students’ visual health will be ascertained.
Basic Sensory and Integrative Skills
Visual-Motor. Students will create drawings, paintings and other art media projects to illustrate stories heard during language and math blocks. Through playing a pentatonic flute, children will learn to isolate and control individual finger movements.Through wet-on-wet watercolor paintings, children will learn to control a medium through proper use of a paintbrush. Through drawing large symmetrical forms, the children will practice control of the hand and be asked to create matching sides in a mirror form. Pencil grip and pressure will thereby be introduced.
Balance and Movement. See sections from the Grade One Curriculum.
Mathematics
Basic Computation Skills. Given story problems, skill-building, and repeated practice, students will begin to use sequential memory skills. Given story problems and manipulatives, students will write a computational formula representation of the mathematical aspects of the story using the four basic computation skills. Given a computational formula representation, students will write a vertical representation of the problem. Students will work vertical problems with increasing accuracy and will learn laws, such as “commutative laws”, to check accuracy. Given story problems and numeric representations of these problems, students will carry digits in single- and double-digit addition. Given word problems, students will complete subtraction problems using single-digit numbers, single- and double-digit numbers, and double-digit numbers. Students will complete simple math problems (all operations) without use of objects or written assistance (mental arithmetic). Using games providing skill/capacity and practice, students will answer questions such as, “what is 12 plus 12″?
Math Concepts. Given imaginative characters representing the four mathematical operations and the concept of equal, students will verbally describe the nature of each operation and the concept of equivalency. Given rhythmic practice and games, students will count to 100 by ones, twos, fives, and tens. Given rhythmic games and activities, students will correctly identify any integer as even or odd. Given rhythmic practice, students will recite the times tables 1-5, giving the product first (rhythmic memory). Given rhythmic activities, students will be exposed to the times tables 6-12. Given a story and pictorial imagination, students will master the concept of place value in a base ten number system. Students will group and regroup numbers according to place value. Given an array of different length objects, students will order them correctly, according to lengths. Given an array of objects that can be sub-grouped, students will name groups and subgroups and identify which is larger in number and explain why (e.g., there are more flowers because roses are flowers). Students will correctly identify inclusive group even when the subgroup is larger (e.g., 4 tulips, 10 roses, 3 daisies—are there more roses or more flowers? Why?). Given drawings and activities, students will recognize and describe number patterns. (Example: given the story of “King 12” and how he grouped members of his kingdom, students will circle all possible groupings of 12 and, by comparing it to other numbers, recognize it as the “richest” number.) Given verbal numbers 1-1,000, students will correctly write the number on a sheet of paper. Students will become increasingly accurate in reading numeric representations. Students will write four-digit numbers accurately from dictation. Given daily practice and reminders, students will become familiar with the weekly and monthly calendar.
Social Studies
Given walks in the school area, students will identify major features of the area, including businesses and neighbors. Given good examples, contingencies, reminders, and reinforcement, students will further develop social use of language skills (saying excuse me, thank you, etc.). Through stories and discussion, students will increase their awareness of social life, past and present. Through games (especially cooperative ones) students will learn to play constructively together (take turns, be fair, etc.).
Science
Given songs, poems and plays about the seasons, students will increase their awareness of the seasons and their changes. Given stories, nature walks, poems, activities and exercises, students will display increased observation skills. Given various objects in and from nature, students will place them into categories. Given the grouping in the above example, students will identify sub and super-groups. Given event descriptions or pictures, students will properly sequence them (e.g., a seed, a sprout, a plant, a flowering plant, a fruiting plant, a dying plant) and indicate the circular nature of the process (e.g., the dying plant followed by seed sprouting).
Music
Given a melody played on a xylophone, recorder (flute) or sung, students will increase their abilities to accurately echo the melody with and without words. Given finger exercises and melodies played on a pentatonic flute, students will echo with increasing fluidity. Given clapping exercises, students will demonstrate abilities to maintain a beat by participating and leading a group (students will be divided into sub-groups). Through increasingly complex clapping, walking and dancing patterns to poems and songs, students will increase their coordination and rhythmic capacities. Through imaginative stories and images, students will begin to write musical notation and read simple melody line notation.
