Second Grade
Second Grade: Finding My Place
Knowing more about their world and how to explore it from their studies in First Grade, the Second Grade develops students’ sense of finding their own place as they study the people, plants and animals that have lived in the United States. They are now developmentally at an age where their understanding of past, present, and future is more developed. This is a study rooted in the land and its affect on life, and in turn, how living things affect the land.
The fall term begins with a study of trees and Native Americans; it ends with the class leading the school in a celebration of Thanksgiving for the harvest and sponsoring a service project for the local shelter. The winter term expands the study with an investigation of fossils and dinosaurs and the westward expansion of the United States. The spring term moves from the grand scale to a tinier one in a study of soil and ants, and a historical study of Notable Americans. Field Trips may include walking trips to study trees, The Natural History Museum, The National Museum of the American Indian, Madam Tussaud’s Wax Museum, and the Hudson Hikes. While students have been fully introduced into decoding, these skills need to be reinforced and strengthened. If the emphasis was on learning to decode in First Grade, in Second Grade students are introduced to more standardized ways of coding – spelling. This is the year when students will move from focusing on how to read and write words, to using text as a more fluent way of learning, like knowing how to drive without having to think about how to move your feet and the wheel and monitor traffic at the same time. The different processes come together to work as a system. Students begin to read for content and write more of the information they research. Nonfiction reading is focused on each term in the integrated theme study. The final writing project is a biography, which includes citing of sources.
Mathematics continues to focus on developing strategies and choosing optimal ones to solve problems. In numbers and operations students now work with two digit addition and subtraction. Telling time and work with simple fractions are topics of study. Measurement, geometry, statistics and probability are additional components of math study.
A culminating project is the Notable American Wax Museum. This tiny snapshot moment helps us all see the important work that children can do. Each student chooses an important person from American history, often one that could be a role model for him or her. The students research, develop a timeline, write, record quotes, make a voice recording, craft artifacts and a puppet, develop a costume, choose movement, and share all of this in a simulated wax museum in which they become these Notable Americans for family, friends and fellow students. Many people are noticeably moved at this presentation – perhaps it is the music or the beauty of all the goodness the characters represent or the glimpse into the future of all the dreams we share for who these students might become.