What your Child Will Be Working on in 2nd Grade
PMA GRADE 2 CURRICULUM
The school has organized its educational programs to be consistent with its Catholic mission and philosophy, recognizing that all students are unique individuals, created in the image and likeness of God.
The Pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten programs promote learning in a developmentally appropriate manner. In Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 2, children are seen as learners, thinkers, and investigators. They are encouraged to interact with the world through a variety of activities.
The Grade 3-5 program is designed to encourage students to actualize their potential as independent, self-motivated, and well-rounded students. Creative projects allow students to express themselves through a variety of media.
The Middle School years are a particularly important time for developing personal responsibility, decision-making, and higher-order thinking skills. The curriculum emphasizes the importance of planning for long-term assignments and projects.
LANGUAGE ARTS
Second graders experience the joy of reading as they are exposed to a wide variety of literature. They develop comprehension by learning to understand the main idea, draw inferences, make predictions, and determine cause and effect. Reading skills are solidified as decoding is refined and sight vocabulary increases. Students in the second grade share their knowledge, opinions, and ideas in class discussions and give oral presentations. The students express their creativity in stories, poems, personal narratives, and nonfiction pieces such as “How To” books. Through the editing process, students apply their emerging skills in composition, basic grammar, punctuation, and spelling to their writing. Penmanship and spelling skills are incorporated into the language arts program. Techniques are utilized to allow students to learn to read through methods best suited to their individual needs. Students participate in shared reading, group activities, independent reading, and reading across the curriculum. Cursive writing is introduced in grade 2 and refined in grade three.
SOCIAL STUDIES
Second graders learn how Americans choose leaders and make laws. They look at the rights and responsibilities of citizens. They discover how the governments of a community, a state, and our country are alike and different. As they explore the world around them, they learn about the geography of the land, how the climate and seasons affect how we live, and how the regions in the United States compare to other regions around the world. With regard to our resources, second graders discuss how people use them and modify their environment as they build different kinds of communities. They also learn how technology changes communities and helps us conserve our resources. During the second semester, the students expand their knowledge of how people and places change over time and how people and events become a part of our country’s heritage. They also explore different world cultures and how groups share their traditions and customs with others. As the school year comes to a close, the students learn about the jobs people do to earn money and how they choose to spend their money.
SCIENCE
As Presentation of Mary Academy seeks to innovate in education, our faculty actively engage students through an interdisciplinary, inquiry-focused, hands-on curriculum based upon STEM lessons that integrate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math concepts into topics being taught. Our science program is creating excitement in the pre-k-5 as students explore and build machines, problem solve in the digital and real worlds, design, implement, and analyze outcomes from scientific experiments, and explore how the natural and human-designed worlds work. This foundation will help prepare the students to be active, informed participants in the explosive growth of scientific and technological discovery in the world.
Students explore how to use inquiry skills and science tools. They learn what technology and the design process are and how we can use and improve them. They expand their knowledge of plants and animals with regard to their cycles and environments. They discuss the earth’s resources and how the earth changes. During the second semester, they learn about the weather and how it affects living things. Students also explore the solar system and what causes day and night. At the conclusion of the school year, they study changes in matter and the different states of water, along with energy and magnets.
MATHEMATICS
Second graders work with larger numbers and are introduced to more complex operations in addition and subtraction. Games and a variety of manipulatives help to reinforce their number facts and comprehension of place value. Through the use of chip trading, bean counters, and base ten blocks, students develop an understanding of addition and subtraction with regrouping. Standard units of measurement are used in a variety of activities to teach about time and different systems of measurement. Color tiles, tangrams, and geo-boards make such topics as congruence, area, perimeter, and symmetry more meaningful. Students also learn to represent unit fractions from 1/2 to 1/10 and become familiar with such terms as numerator and denominator.
Literacy
- Paying close attention to details, including illustrations and graphics, in stories and books to answer who, what, where, when, why, and how questions
- Determining the lesson or moral of stories, fables, and folktales
- Using text features (e.g., captions, bold print, indexes) to locate key facts or information efficiently
- Writing an opinion about a book he or she has read, using important details from the materials to support that opinion
- Writing stories that include a short sequence of events and include a clear beginning, middle, and end
- Mathematics
- Quickly and accurately adding with a sum of 20 or less (e.g., 11 + 8); quickly and accurately subtracting from a number 20 or less (e.g., 16 – 9); and knowing all sums of one-digit numbers from memory by the end of the year
- Understanding what the digits mean in three-digit numbers (place value)
- Using understanding of place value to add and subtract three-digit numbers (e.g., 811 – 367); adding and subtracting two-digit numbers quickly and accurately (e.g., 77 – 28)
- Measuring and estimating length in standard units
- Solving addition and subtraction word problems involving length (e.g., “The pen is 2 cm longer than the pencil. If the pencil is 7 cm long, how long is the pen?”)
- Building, drawing, and analyzing 2-D and 3-D shapes to develop foundations for area, volume, and geometry in later grades